Re: GSP statement on use of my dinosaur restorations (follow up)

["Andrew A. Farke" <afarke@gmail.com>]

1) I fully support an artist's right to confront cases of clear piracy 
of his or her images, whether in the scientific literature or in the 
popular media.

2) Speaking as a scientist (and only as a scientist - I am not a legal 
expert), I find it troubling that skeletal reconstructions could be 
"locked down" from any derivative use by outside parties. (i.e., use of 
a reconstruction to produce a life restoration - cases of pure copying 
as seen with the Krzyzanowskisaurus example are undoubtedly wrong) Also, 
I'm pretty sure any Tyrannosaurus skeleton that I draw is going to have 
similar limb proportions to Greg's much more elegant renderings. Jeff 
Martz had a good point - where do we draw the line on similarity? Two 
individuals starting with the same specimen may very well end up with a 
similar reconstruction. As for the locking down the "running pose" - 
others have expressed my opinion more eloquently. Good grief. Even if 
there _is_ legal support for this (and who knows - there may well be), 
it might end up being a case of winning the battle but losing the war.

3) That said, it does bother me when I see fellow scientists use images 
in presentations without acknowledging the artist. A little text credit 
at the bottom takes little time and space to do. Personally, I've gone 
more and more to using public domain and/or creative commons images in 
my public presentations (even if some aren't as elegant as commercially 
available restorations), to avoid any potential hard feelings.

4) Some folks earlier were talking about organizing illustrators of a 
paleontological bent. For those who have not heard of it (and I suspect 
many have), I might recommend checking out the Guild of Natural Science 
Illustrators (http://www.gnsi.org/). After all, dinosaurs and mammoths 
are natural science, are they not?

Andy