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"Thank you for your attempts at playing Netcop. I don't believe that Tufte
holds a copyright on the image created by someone in 1869. I'm sure that
neither of the charts is his "intellectual property", as they were created by
other people and only used by him for illustrative purposes."
I believe you're probably correct. In his book "The Quantitative Display
of Visual Information", Tufte presents the "Napoleon's March" graph with
no attribution, other than that contained in the body of the graph itself
(dressee par M.Minard, Inspecteur General des Pont et Chaussees en retraits).
If Tufte can use Minard's graph without copyright notice, I expect it's
probably in the public domain. And if it's _not_, it certainly wouldn't
be Tufte who had been slighted, since it wasn't his work in the first place.