Legal issues
There are to our knowledge practically no
established practices and rules governing the
use of data derived from photogrammetric
modeling. It is therefore always advisable to
contact the responsible curators in advance and
agree to a bilateral agreement on file
ownership, copyright and file use permissions.
This approach is especially important for
photography conditions that are not covered by
free-use rules, e.g. in collection rooms of
museums.
Additionally, a very important issue is the
automatic copyright transfer included in the
Terms of Use of some (often cloud-based) free
photogrammetry software programs. Use of
such programs should be avoided at all cost,
especially when digitizing specimens owned by
third parties. Such a transfer of ownership is
the reason why we exclude, for example, the
no-fee software 123D Catch.