> When you talk about clearing properly you are applying modern notions to
> historic situations. The notion of copyright and clearing copyrights is
> quite modern.
1709 is modern?
> Licensing is also quite modern.
I'm pretty sure the romans had the concept. There are certain types of
business transactions that are rather hard to do without them (for
example you might give someone license to mine part of your land or
move something across it) and government granted monopolies frequently
sub-license.
> It is easy to expect the
> clearing of copyright to be done properly it is however an unreasonalbe
> expectation.
Not really. Sorting images into "almost certainly safe" and
"everything else" is fairly easy.
> There have been Wikimedians who explicitly stated that material that
> predated the oldest free licenses were unfree because they did not state
> their preferred license.
Links?
>The analogy is true in that many people made
> pictures and they were bought and sold and re-use of the material was not
> considered, let alone re-use in our current digital scenarios.
Fortunately such situations are trivial to deal with. Since IP rights
are separate from the physical object unless the image was
commissioned the copyright states with the initial author.
> Historic situations are ambiguous from our perspective of what makes a
> "proper clearance". Often the photographers is likely to be dead. It is
> impossible to ask him, it is almost impossible to learn who the current
> right holder may be.
None of that is of any significance. Without a positive release
statement no release exists therefor copyright remains locked down and
in possession of the heirs
>It is exactly to prevent the material to be lost
> forever that this material ended up in archives and museums. It is exactly
> to prevent this material to be lost and remain lost that museums and
> archives want to share this material with us.
Forever? Outside of Mexico anything over 170 years old can be assumed
to be in the public domain.
--
geni