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COPYRIGHT IN PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANCIENT ARTIFACTS
Photographs taken by collectors of ancient arti-facts are the subject matter of a recent legal in-terpretation by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), in which the IPO addressed the issue of whether the making and sale of such photographs involves use of copyright.
The IPO stated that in the case of a Shang-dynasty bronze artifact that is several thousand years old, no copyright attaches to the item itself; if a collector photographs the artifact, and the photograph simply reproduces the arti-fact’s appearance, such that there is no act of photographic creation, then the act of merely photographing an item that is not copyrightable does not create a photographic work under the Copyright Act. But if photographing such a non-copyright artifact involves the exercise of skills such as choice of lighting, adjustment of focus, control of shutter speed, and operation of the shutter, in a manner sufficient to express the photographer’s creativity and thought, and is thus creative in nature, the photograph so pro-duced is a photographic work and copyrightable under the Copyright Act. However, because the bronze artifact so photographed is not itself part of the photographic work, if a person creates a three-dimensional object based on the artifact depicted in the photograph, this does not involve the copyright, and does not infringe on the pho-tographic work.