Copyright question

[Gadget]

Thank you.

I do remember when I first started exhibiting  photographs and fine art  professionally in the late 1980s/90s that I was told death plus 70 yrs.

Academic books were left to the publishers - I just took the royalties!  (I still have some coming in  from a 1999 publication!)

[MollyC]

As an aside to this, for works with a corporate author, when copyright was generally extended to 70 years, the Ordnance Survey stated that copyright in their publications would remain at 50 years.  It is for this reason that the National Library of Scotland maps website is currently adding those published in the 1970s as they come out of copyrght.

[Biggles50]

All this goes to show how messed up Copyright is in this country, it fails to properly protect the people it should but allows large organisations to "claim" copyright on whatever they please knowing that ordinary users are never going to take them to court to make them prove their claim.

What really bugs me about it is what possible motive do Public Archives have for doing it, surely their remit is to hold, preserve and allow access to records. Most of the Parish Registers, for example, have been filmed decades ago but the archives go out of their way to try and restrict access to them by claiming copyright which they could not possibly have, knowing that they are very unlikely to be challenged.

One can understand multinational corporations using copyright this way, but for publicly funded archives to do it seems wrong to me, possibly legally but certainly morally.

Well said.

I would argue that all the material held by any public funded Archives IS in the Public Domain.

The material held does not belong to the Archives it belongs to the Public.

People who donate material to public Archives surely do so to enable interested parties to have access to said material for their research and knowledge and by doing so they freely gave their possessions for the great good and that any public Archive does not have the right to put limitations on what use said material can and cannot be used for as long as it does not violate the wishes of the donor family.

Acknowledge the source of the repository of the material by all means

The Archives remit being the preserving and safeguarding documents and items freely donated into its care.

[MollyC]

This goes right back to my reply #3.

The image may be out of copyright, but the Archives holds reproduction rights, by virtue of having collected it and made it available.

Archive services do not run on thin air and their funding has reduced considerably over many years.  Adding to collections by purchases, cataloguing properly including recording copyright where applicable, scanning, secure air-conditioned storage of originals and digital copies, operating a website - these all cost money.

Provision of copies is one of the few areas in which public library services generally are legally allowed to charge the public. There can be no charges for walking through the door, requesting a reader's card and asking to view any of their collections.

[Archivos]

I would argue that all the material held by any public funded Archives IS in the Public Domain.

The material held does not belong to the Archives it belongs to the Public.

People who donate material to public Archives surely do so to enable interested parties to have access to said material for their research and knowledge and by doing so they freely gave their possessions for the great good and that any public Archive does not have the right to put limitations on what use said material can and cannot be used for as long as it does not violate the wishes of the donor family.

Acknowledge the source of the repository of the material by all means

The Archives remit being the preserving and safeguarding documents and items freely donated into its care.

There are many collections held in archives which are accessible to the public which have restrictions placed on them, either by the depositor (eg, copyright, being asked before allowing an item to be looked at, and so on) or by various pieces of legislation, such as what is now GDPR. Many collections, including photographs, will have been deposited with no thought to copyright. Photographs in particular are a minefield, but so are things like orphan works and unpublished material. Copyright on some items that are classed as 'old' can last until 2039.

Material in public archives doesn't belong to the public. That's like saying houses or property owned by a public authority belongs to the public, which isn't true - they're for the use of the public, in the same way their archives are.