Hi, I don't know about American law but in Canada it is the owner of the
negative who owns the copyright to the photographs.  Here, if you provide
the film then theoretically you own copyright.   It's not quite that simple
of course (there is the question of who hold the copyright to the object
itself)but it might be worthyour while having a look at your copyright act -
ours is currently being changed and I am awaiting the good/badnews.
C.Mayer
At 05:16 PM 12/6/96 GMT, you wrote:
>In talking with a designer about our problems getting good quality
>photographs of museum artifacts to use in our publications (we don't have
>a photographer on staff), the designer said she probably could get
>professional photographers to donate some time to take photos.   However,
>she continued, with the new copyright laws on photography, they will own
>the photograph and will want to sell them to catalogs.
>
>I told her this was not acceptable to us, since we charge for outside use
>of artifact photographs.  Her response was then we probably couldn't get
>any photographer to donate time.
>
>Has anyone run into this problem?  I realized that photography is covered
>under the copyright law, but I didn't realize that there is a market for
>photographs of individual artifacts.
>
>Paulette Fox
>Public Relations Manager
>Tennessee State Museum
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