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by foo101 2311 days ago
> This is not what happened. They never were granted the rights to sublicense it.

This is not what happened. They were granted the rights to sublicense it. Placing a piece of work in public domain automatically grants others to do whatever they want with it including sublicensing it.
2 comments
Marazan 2311 days ago
They were not granted the exclusive right to sub licence it.

Happy now?

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foo101 2311 days ago
The image was put in public domain. No further exclusive rights are required to sublicense it. You are allowed to pick work from public domain and sublicense it if you want to.
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bcrosby95 2311 days ago
The whole example was about having exclusive rights so anyone that had the image must be infringing. That presumption is gone once the image is in the public domain.

The problem isn't that Getty is trying to license an image, the problem is Getty is contacting people already using a public domain image and trying to get them to pay them money to use it.

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bonzini 2311 days ago
Since they were not given exclusive rights, how could they know that whoever used the picture was infringing their rights and had to pay them a license fee? They didn't.
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diffeomorphism 2310 days ago
That is not how grammar works... . The point is about exclusive sublicensing. Of course, they are allowed to sublicense it, nobody ever questioned that, but that has nothing to do with the discussion.
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anigbrowl 2311 days ago
You can't have a sublicense for something in which no licensing rights inhere to begin with. I think you understand this very well and are choosing to pretend otherwise.
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lonelappde 2311 days ago
What "license" was sub-licensed?
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emn13 2311 days ago
IANAL, so honest question - is that actually true? Is it legal to sell a license to a public domain work? Is it OK to fail to tell the person you're signing the contract with that they don't need it?

That's sort of like me selling you a driving license - when you already have one, and I don't actually have any authority to grant or rescind that permission either way. I mean; sure... you will have the permission after the sale, but it's at least a pretty dubious construction.

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