DB Annex

from Matt Haughey:
If you re-read the LoC stuff, they simply "request the courtesy of a
credit", meaning, nothing is required by law.

Public Domain by definition means there is absolutely no owner, and
anyone can do anything they want with it. I've seen numerous Project
Gutenberg mirrors and spin-offs, thanks to everything being Public
Domain there.

I worked at the Creative Commons for four years, I helped launch the
movement and worked closely with Lawrence Lessig to make up the
licenses. I'm well-versed on the law.

The bottom line is that while it'd be nice if the guy mentioned the
source, he doesn't legally have to do anything, and it appears he
doesn't mention them, which isn't breaking any law.

Matt
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With all due respect Matt, what the fuck does the law have to do with anything?
"Public Domain by definition means there is absolutely no owner, and
anyone can do anything they want with it"
Yeah? So where is "it"?
Lying on the ground in Washington D.C.?
The presence of those images online is not the result of some inevitable progression from photographer to collector to free public access. There's a tremendous amount of custodial work involved there. Screw the letter of the law, it's the spirit, and not of the law, but of something higher than law which pertains more to the thing we are and the things we do as a common enterprise, the human thing we all are here, moving through time and doing all these things we do, including making, and looking at, photographs.
My main point, trying to be brief and succinct here, is they - the LoC - do, yes, they do merely ask, clearly and nicely, for attribution, but - key, important, vital - they don't *have to* put those images out there, made digitally available to anyone with an internet connection. They could lock them up behind a paywall, tout d'suite.
Part of the mandate for librarians generally is to do that, make information freely accessible, but it isn't particularly a legal issue, that's more economic, eh? It becomes a legal issue only when it's made into one. Or is money really the transcendent human valence so many would like it to be? I'm assuming you don't believe that.
The overlap between law and morality, or ethics or whatever categorical distinction you want to work with, that's a big wide territory, and in a lot of people's lives they're synonymous, but then a lot of people voted for Bush in the last election. A whole mega-bunch of people think anything that's not against the law is good to go, but I'm still possibly naively assuming decent and relatively intelligent is the default human condition. So that scams of this nature are aberrant, not status quo ante. You seem to indicating a position to the contrary, or a neutrality that's tacitly permissive.
You're straddling a fence that was put up in the middle of the night by claim-jumping scalliwags.
So okay, you're not legally required to step in, he's not legally required to cease and desist, the LoC is not legally required to make those images available, Bush is not legally required to pull out of Iraq, and I'm not legally required to do all I can to prevent World War 3 from wiping out the entire mammalian branch of the tree of life. Everytime I run that logical chain I end up back at - Do Something!
You're letting this parasite use your site to further his own petty nefarious money-scheme, I could give a rat's ass whether that has any legal aspects or not.
He's profaning something that I think will prove to have been, at the end of the day, when things are all in perspective, sacred. And you're, passively, enabling that.
Yes, they're subtle issues, and murky, and ethically indistinct, but then important questions quite often are.

Thanks for replying.

cheers
msg