Can Health And Human Services Copyright New Smoking Package Warnings?

As you hopefully know, content created by the US federal government is supposed to automatically go into the public domain. There are a few exceptions, mainly having to do with work created for the government by others. But Dave P. reasonably asks why the highly publicized new graphic (in more ways than one) "warning" labels for cigarette packages appear to have a very blatant copyight notice, claiming that the copyright is held by HHS (Health & Human Services). You can see the full PDF, which is also embedded below, but you can see the first image here, with a © notice in the lower lefthand corner: The really bizarre one is the last one, which appears to just be a red triangle with an exclamation point: It appears that a red triangle with an exclamation point is widely used in other areas as well. In fact, if you do an image search for such things, you can find tons upon tons of red triangles with exclamation points inside. Perhaps HHS should sue.

Or, better yet, recognize that this is copyfraud and drop the bogus © notices.

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