Hi Bob
  
->  I would say her only recourse is to mention that unless her name
->  and business card appears along with her picture, she intends to
->  send three of her Sicilian friends over to discuss the possibility
->  of buying insurance to protect his investment in equipment required
->  for his business.

ROFL!!!
-> 
->  He has possession of the negatives and is the only other person in
->  the world who knows for sure from where they came.  Then if honesty
->  and friendship mean nothing, then maybe a family connection could be
->  used to make everything right.

So you agree, if you no longer have the negatives, you sure can't prove you
did the work.
-> 
->  But taking this thought a bit further in a more realistic manner
->  begs the question what would she do if she had taken the pictures with
->  a digital camera? How can she or he for that matter prove ownership
->  of anything that consist of purely bits and bytes.  

That's what brought everyone out of the woodwork here in the first place. 
I wanted to know just that!

  That's where a
->  registration system might be useful.

Registration???
->  If I took one of your photos from Photosig and
->  used Photoshop to modify it, is it still your photo or is it now mine?

It's mine and you'd be a thief.
Say, for instance, I decided one of Ansel Adams picture would make a good
painting.  If I painted it, the colours would be mine, and it would then
definitely look different.  But that's still not legal, nor is it original.
It has to be labled, as being adapted from one of his pictures.

->  The supreme court just granted a long extension of copyright protection
->  for Micky Mouse and other cartoon characters.

The copyright was the life of the author plus 50 years.  It has now been
extended by a further 20 years.  I'm not sure that is  long enough, for
that sort of thing.  Actually, I think something should be owned and
protected until there is nobody who cares to own it anymore, and only then
pass into the public domain.  In some cases, like the Disney cartoons, that
could be almost forever, or until such things become so uninteresting that
even the family doesn't care anymore.  

Never mind, I just popped in here to ROFL at your first paragraph.

Karen
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