Lately, we've been talking a lot about ownership and rights, copyright and fair use. So it seems topical to note that English Heritage is now claiming that it owns every picture ever taken of Stonehenge. (Original takedown request) Setting aside the fact that the idea of finding and registering every Stonehenge picture taken is completely absurd, it raises interesting questions about ownership. Sure, I presume that British Heritage goes to a lot of work to handle, manage, and maintain Stonehenge. It probably costs quite a bit of money to keep those rocks standing upright. But even if we assume that Neolithic Britons decided to invent copyright law and set the length at a modest 'artist's life plus 4000 years,' it's still past that time by a good few centuries.
So can we say that British Heritage owns Stonehenge and all rights to it? They didn't really buy it. They didn't trade for it. They certainly didn't make it themselves. It's just that their distant, distant ancestors put some remarkably heavy slabs of stone in a particular place and left them there. Even if they didn't want it anymore, it's hardly as if they could just hide it in a bookshelf or stuff it in somebody's attic. But now it's there, and it's theirs, and it's popular, so they can take advantage of it. Seems a bit odd to me.
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