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I come across so many paintings of landscapes, birds, flowers & nature daily on the Internet.
Most of them look similar to one another. But surprisingly all the artists who do these works say they have copyrights to these works. Anybody can paint a sunset or a bird. How can some people claim only they have the right to these pictures of Nature? On one of my visits to a place on the banks of river Krishna here, I saw several artists sitting in a place & painting pictures of sunset & boats sailing in the river. They all resembled one another. In such cases who should have the copyrights to these pictures? Anybody can do these pictures.
I feel only artists with unique works which are well thought and planned in their minds those that have good themes should have copyrights like the intellectual property rights. Not the ones that reproduce from the Nature. Because Nature belongs to everyone & anybody can copy nature's works.

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Yes, Ninon, it is difficult to prove in cases of works on Nature that somebody copied your work.
Krishna

Ninon CZ said:
I would have to look it up....but copyright and intellectual property are very murky waters to prove either way. You are right and it would be very hard for a nature artist to claim someone copied them. To claim anyone copied you, you have to have some cash and a really good lawyer, but even then the person suing has the burden of proof. The people who sue and are sucessful have names like "Bill Gates" and "George Lucus." Most others are throwing money to the wind!
Thanks, Minnie, for the information. Recently, one of the artists here painted a picture by copying from a photograph taken by a famous photographer. It was an exact copy. I saw both the pictures. Newspapers reported this. But many artists supported the artist saying that it is okay to copy a picture from a photograph as they are two forms of art & many artists do this!

Minnie W. Shuler said:
You are right, no one has rights to the image of one of Nature's creatures, they copyright I think the lighting, pose, perspective, contrast,composition and other technical parts of photogrpahing or painting a scene or animal. Yes, very murkey waters. I remember a case of someone using a photographer's photo of several puppies. It was argued that the puppies could not be copyrighted. I think the case wound up with the photogrpaher winning since he was considered to have owned the pose, lighting and positioning of the puppies, but not their likenesses. It seems that it was ruled that the original and copy had to differ in at least 3 major ways for it to be considered uniquely different and fall out of the photographer's intellectual rights. Not just size or color, but positioning, angle, perspective, pose etc.
Yes, I know because I struggle a lot to get a piece done & think about them for days & years. When you are the first one to do anything either in science or art, you have to face lots of difficulties. A copyist don't have to face all these turmoils of the mind.

Minnie W. Shuler said:
Actually there are quite a few artists that think this is acceptable. Most, however, I think, do not think so. There is a tremendous amount of skill needed to copy anything. It is erroneously assumed that the artist doing the copying has a great of a talent as the artist they copied. I do not think this is so. There is something genuinely creative about original art created by someone....there were artistic skills that were put into play beyond the brush strokes of the work. A copiest may have the brush strokes but they definitly do not have the genius of the original artist. who made all of the decisions about subject, composition, color, lighting, design, etc.
Thanks, Pierre, for the link. Yes, the pictures of the crows are done differently in each work. But I have seen artists painting a picture in the same way because they have a common model or a picture as reference. Even the colours used are the same! They just look like carbon copies of one another! But they haven't been copied from one another & nobody can claim they have done it first & therefore have the copy right!
Artists can do the work differently on a single theme but they can also do the work like photocopies of one another if they have a common reference or a model like a sunset or a view of a river.
Then who can claim they have the copy right for these works? All of them?
Krishna
Pierre Tavlitzki said:
All crows are similar, all art showing a crow is different. The copyright is protecting the artist, the crow does not require to be protected for his image. The crow does not ask for money for living. He prefers worms and insects.

Look at this page from Wikimedia, as an example on crows.

Clicking on any image in Wikipedia or Wikimedia you access their detailed opinion concerning the copyright status of the image. It is the best practical way to become familiar with copyright.

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