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Mexico Wants Payment For Aztec Images

Posted by samzenpus on from the montezuma's-latest-revenge dept.

innocent_white_lamb writes "Starbucks brought out a line of cups with prehistoric Aztec images on them. Now the government of Mexico wants them to pay for the use of the images. Does the copyright on an image last hundreds of years?"

7 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good luck with that by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's like the British government suing anyone who does things based on William Shakespeare because he was English.

    Or for something even more absurd: the modern British government, which is descended from a system put in place by the Normans, suing someone who uses imagery from Beowulf.

    Mexico is run by a culture and people primarily descended from the people who killed off the Aztecs. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in Mexico today, but they're pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Mexican government is the heir of the Spanish Empire.

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  2. Re:Copyright or "cultural heritage"? by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But if you kill everyone in a culture, you can claim it?

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  3. Re:I've got a stronger claim by electrons_are_brave · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Lucky ducky that your family has a tartan! I'm Scottish from a long line of Scots, but being a grotty lowlanders, we had naught but a knock on the head handed down through the generations. However, there are rules of use for tartans - and I'm quite happy to protect your families heritage from being ripped off by some American fast food chain. It's not about copyright to me - it's also the issue of treating other people's culture with respect. For example, in Australia, it became quite common for people to use "aboriginal" designs to flog tourist items, while the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people died in poverty of third world diseases. And how many record companies have ripped of poor Africans for source music without paying them a cent?

    Mexico is a pretty poor country. I wouldn't object to there being some fund for use of these images for profit in foreign countries provided the money went into some cultural preservation purposes (for maintenance of the ruins or something).

    I don't really see it as a copyright issue at all. I would have linked to have read more about the matter than the link above gave.

  4. Re:Good luck with that by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FTA: "The government archaeological agency said Wednesday it will decide by next week whether Starbucks should pay any fees. "

    Has anyone thought yet to ask where the images came from? It seems obvious to me that what could have happened was that Starbucks took photographs taken by the government archaeological society, which the society may have used for post-cards, t-shirts, or other tourism items and placed them on Starbucks mugs without paying fees to the Mexican government for those photographs.

    Those photographs would then be copyright, just as any photograph would.

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  5. Re:Good luck with that by jdgeorge · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The article was light on significant details. It looks as if these images are used effectively as trademarks in Mexico, used for purposes of tourism, or some such thing. This is obviously not a copyright issue.

  6. LMAO by multimediavt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's next? We're going to have to pay the Italians for using Roman letters and the Saudi's for using Arabic numbers? Ridiculous!

  7. Re:Copyright out of hand by eleuthero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While your experience with Starbucks is apparently different than mine, I fail to see how a company that pays more than minimum wage for essentially minimum wage work ... that also offers benefits (for actual Starbucks owned stores) to all employees after only a few months employment, is "evil" because it "underpays" its workers. Or are you talking about a different company?