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Assume that many years ago an up and coming artist living in Baltimore named Bo Camden had one of his best works stolen while on
Assume that many years ago an up and coming artist living in Baltimore named Bo Camden had one of his best works stolen while on display at a museum in New York. Further assume that, unbeknownst to him, the museum had taken a high denition photograph of the painting and had submitted it tothe insurance company in orderto receive a lower fee for the insurance the museum took out on paintings it displayed. The idea was that the photographs could be submitted to the police in the event that the paintings were ever stolen. Otherwise, the photographs were routinely destroyed after the term of the insurance policy had passed. However, at some point a small startup company came on the scene and started archiving digital versions of the photos of stolen paintings. They created a \"painting recognition algorithm\" that was so good that if a gallery or museum suspected that someone was trying to sell them a stolen painting, they could use an iPhone orAndroid app to take a picture ofthe painting in question, which would then be compared to pictures in the database and, ifthere was a "hit," the prospective buyer would be notied, as would the insurance company that had originally insured the painting. As time went on the company realized that there was another market for its services. They found that the more photographs of paintings by a particular artist they had on le, the better their program did at identifying new paintings not in its database by that particular artist. In fact, the program was able to do much better than the human appraisers who have traditionally performed this service. Thus, if a museum or gallery were considering buying a painting by an artist without the proper authentication. the gallery or museum could be much more certain thatthe Rembrandt they thought they were buying was a real Rembrandt and not some knock off. With the launching ofthis new service, the company started operating under the name of RealThing.com (RealThing). This company ended up being much more successful than anyone ever would have expected. It tums out there is a lot of art forgery going on and with a large enough database of works by a particular artist, this company always successfully identied the fakes. And since they relied on a database rather than expensive art appraisers. they could sell their services for a song and still get rich because now every gallery could afford appraisal services. One day someone tried to sell that stolen painting of Ho Camden's to a San Francisco gallery and, as was its practice. the gallery paid to have the painting authenticated by RealThing. Sure enough, it identied the painting. alerted the gallery that it was stolen, and notied the insurance company. The police were informed and a series of articles were written about the company. One of those articles caught the attention of Bo Camden. At rst Mr. Camden was grateful that the company had caught the thieves who stole his painting. But the more he read, the more he started to get annoyed. After some checking he conrmed that RealThing had hundreds of images of his paintings in their database. One of the ways that Camden made his living was by selling prints of his work and it occurred to him that RealThing had never paid for the right to make copies of his paintings. And it also occurred to him that the only reason they were making so much money was that his and other artists works were in that database, making it possible for RealThing to be so accurate. Bo felt this was yet another \"mple of someone getting rich o an artist's work without ever paying that artist. He got so angry that he decided to sue RealThing for copyright infringement. Who is more likely to prevail in this case? Ho? Dr RealThing? Write about each party's chances of success
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