On 22 October 2014 17:17, Sarah Stierch sarah.stierch@gmail.com wrote:
To be brutally honest: the university can claim copyright over the photographs of those images all they want but they will lose that case in a court of law if the photograph is of an object that was created before 1923.
(Slight tangent) plus several other dates if the photograph was taken in Japan or Europe...
As regular batch uploader to Wikimedia Commons, I have just given a 'non-legal' opinion along these lines for an author wanting to use World War II photographs by UK forces in their book. These are all expired copyright (50 years after creation), but institutions tend to claim copyright restrictions out of habit rather than design. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/email/IWM and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fae#Confusion_re_use_of_Public_D....
Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae