Yann Forget wrote:
For my practical use, is a photograph taken in India in 1908 by a Indian photographer is public domain in USA (first published in India)? and if it is taken in 1920? in 1945? and if the photographer is American (first published in USA)? and if the photographer is from a third country, England, for example? (Indian copyright law is "public domain 60 years after publication" for photographs and sound recordings).
Two major problems here: * In many cases, copyright questions may be resolved only on a case-by-case basis. For instance, in many countries, copyright only protects "works of the mind" with no exhaustive and clear definition of what a work of the mind is, and it is possible that certain technical photographs are not works of the mind that can be protected by copyright. However, deciding whether this is the case for a particular photograph will entail examining details related to the photographic process, and thus no clear-cut global answer can be provided.
* In many cases, what we intend to do simply has not been tested in court. People often mistakenly believe that there are things that are "legal" vs things that are "prohibited" and thus that lawyers can tell us which is which. In reality, there are things clearly legal, those clearly illegal, and things in between for which a lawyer may only give some kind of educated guess of whether that would fly in court (which in turn depends on how well we argue our case in court).
Both of this clash with the expectations of many of our users and admins, that is, to get black and white "yes / no" answers to legal queries.