Images of documents from auction sites

[Kiltpin]

Any and all documents produced in the 1700s/1800s are well out of copyright. You can freely use any images, or transcriptions that you have and as there is no copyright, you may charge for this service. 

An excellent example of this is "Papworth's Ordinary". The book is an heraldic reference, but to make it work it must have the same page numbering as the original. Brand-new books, printed today, are an exact copy of the original.

Regards 

Chas

[sonofthom]

The reality is that any image posted on the internet is in the public domain and will be purloined by others for their own use; most of us on this site will have posted family photos on the web to subsequently find them on other people's trees, often wrongly described. Even if you theoretically own the copyright in these photos in practice I would suggest that it is impossible to enforce it.

As the original query here related to an auction site I suspect that the sites terms and conditions will say something about images used in the site.

[Marmalady]

Any and all documents produced in the 1700s/1800s are well out of copyright. You can freely use any images, or transcriptions that you have and as there is no copyright, you may charge for this service. 

Regards 

Chas

The original document is out of copyright.

But the image of the item created by the auction site seller is his/her copyrighted image and should not be used without permission. This is especially true in this case as the OP says the image in question contains not only the document but personal items such as paperweights on the desk.

A transcription would be the copyright of whoever transcribed the document.

The reality is that any image posted on the internet is in the public domain and will be purloined by others for their own use; most of us on this site will have posted family photos on the web to subsequently find them on other people's trees, often wrongly described. Even if you theoretically own the copyright in these photos in practice I would suggest that it is impossible to enforce it.

As the original query here related to an auction site I suspect that the sites terms and conditions will say something about images used in the site.

Images on the net are not automatically "in public domain". Copyright laws apply to them just as if they were published in paper form. It may well be difficult / expensive defending the copyright, but that does not mean it is a free-for-all. Ethical people will respect the law and other people's copyright.

[Andy J2022]

Any and all documents produced in the 1700s/1800s are well out of copyright.

This is not entirely correct. Prior to the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act, unpublished works* (except photographs) were treated as a separate case in which they remained in copyright until they were lawfully published. In theory this could mean that an unpublished work, such as a private letter or diary, could remain in perpetual copyright. The 1988 CDPA addressed this issue by stipulating that all unpublished works in existence before the Act came into force would be protected for a further 50 years then lose their protection. The Act came into force in 1989 so all affected copyright works will have their copyright end on 31 December 2039. As good family historians, we should always quote our sources and in this case it's CDPA 1988 Schedule 1 paragraph 12 sub paragraph (4). To save you looking it up this is what it says:

(4) Copyright in the following descriptions of work continues to subsist until the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the new copyright provisions come into force—

(a) literary, dramatic and musical works of which the author has died and in relation to which none of the acts mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (e) of the proviso to section 2(3) of the 1956 Act has been done;

(b) unpublished engravings of which the author has died;

(c) unpublished photographs taken on or after 1st June 1957.

The reason photographs are dealt with separately is because, following the 1911 Copyright Act  (section 21), all photographs were protected for 50 years from the date they were made, irrespective of whether they were subsequently published or not. This also changed with the passing of the 1988 CDPA and photographs then became subject to the same rules as other types of work.

All works made after 1 August 1989 are subject to the standard copyright term of the lifetime of the author plus 70 years from the end of the year of his/her death.

Copyright is heritable. If there is no express statement in the will of an author or artist about what was to happen with their copyright in any unpublished item, it would have passed along with the physical article (a painting, diary, letters, unpublished manuscript etc) to the person who inherited the article (see section 93 CDPA).

If the person who inherits the unpublished work decides to publish it, the copyright period will then run for 25 years (see Regulation 12 of the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 1996 (SI 1996/2967). And so if you have legally published a work of this sort (that is, any kind of work subject to copyright other than a photograph), you can legally put a copyright notice on it, and contrary to what has been said here, it is not in the public domain, even though it may be freely viewed by anyone.

Finally a point about exceptions to copyright. Many of you will know that it is permissible to copy and in some cases republish small extracts of copyright works provided this is solely for the purpose of private study and research (see section 29 CDPA). This is one of the very few exceptions which does not require that the work being copied must first have been made available to the public. What this means is, if you have access to an unpublished work, but you are not the copyright owner by virtue of inheritance, you may still copy a proportionate amount of the work for your research purposes and you may publish that copy provided that this is for non-commercial purposes. To take an example, publishing your copy made under section 29 along with a tree on Ancestry, or on a forum such as RootsChat, is permissible, but publishing the same thing in book on genealogy which is then put on sale would not be lawful.

This is the position under UK law. Much of the same applies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but the law is entirely different in the USA or elsewhere within the EU for example.


*'Works' here refers to literary, musical, dramatic and artistic works. Films and sound recordings fall under an entirely different set of rules. So if you have inherited Uncle Harry's 8mm home movies, none of this applies to them.

[Andy J2022]

For the sake of completeness, the rules for Crown Copyright do not follow the same pattern as that outlined above. The relevant provisions are to be found in section 163 CDPA, and for convenience, here is what that section says on the subject of duration

(3) Crown copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work continues to subsist—

(a) until the end of the period of 125 years from the end of the calendar year in which the work was made, or

(b) if the work is published commercially before the end of the period of 75 years from the end of the calendar year in which it was made, until the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which it was first so published.