Who own the copyright of t205 images?

[darkhorse9]

You are correct that the issue of copyright is, and always has been a grey one. I've been dealing with Intellectual Property laws for decades and things are always clear as mud there.

Digital media has confused things a lot, but it's about to get MUCH worse with the NIL rules in college sports.

Back to the subject at hand. There is no law preventing you from taking a picture of an item you own and publishing it where you want, unless you are using it for the same purpose as the original intent (i.e. taking a picture of a baseball card and selling it as a baseball card. From a copyright standpoint there's nothing that stops you from taking a picture of a painting in a gallery and publishing that. The only preventative is that usually, when you enter a gallery, there's an expressed contractual agreement of no photography allowed. It's not a copyright problem, it's a legal contract problem.

The game changer involved in pictures of baseball cards on a web site is that they can clearly be defended as fair use under the clause that allows educational study, parody or other ancillary use of the image.

Again, grey areas exist. You can take a picture at a baseball game and publish that with no problem, but you can't use a picture of the television broadcast of the game "without the express written consent of Major League Baseball".

Legally you can't show televised games in a bar without a license. You can't have music playing (even from your own playlist) over your store speakers without a license, you can't show a movie that you own the DVD of in a public place without a license. That's all because entertainment distribution was the original protected origin of the copyright. Broadcasting it in public violates the copyright because the copyright holder can show damages.

I seriously doubt anyone would ever go to jail or get sued over a picture of a baseball card on a web site. There just isn't any legal strength to stand on there. I doubt Topps could prove harm to their copyright protections because a guy posted a card on a website.