Talk:Effect of taxes on employment

Graph copyright

@BD2412: I'm reaching back several years, but if I recall, you were pretty versed in fair use / copyright - correct? Struggling to recall back to when we had to write our own rationales and that debate. These graphs, and a few others we have on our tax articles, use the justification "This file is ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain, because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship." But I"m not sure that's true - they probably do contain original authorship. I don't think we can just screenshot a NYT graph or pull any graph from a publication, unless it's a government work or released under the proper license. As far as I understand, these graphs are copyrighted and we should create our own if we want to present the same data. I expect I'll look like a big asshole if I bring it up to the larger group and probably attacked for targeting one graph or another. Thoughts? Morphh ^(talk) 15:06, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Even if the graph is based on publicly available information, copyright inheres in the author's presentation choices. For a plotted regression analysis like this, there is not much "choice" in the presentation at all, except something like the color of the lines and of the dots. However, on closer inspection, I am seeing a bigger problem, which is the failure of these graphs to indicate their period. The article from which they come says they represent a two-year period, which is an awfully short timeframe from which to draw a valid sample representing outcomes from what is likely to be a long term trend. bd2412 T 15:37, 9 January 2014 (UTC)