On 8/3/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
AFAIK the copyrights were forfeited at the end of the
war.
No, the goverment inherited the rights. The State of Bavaria claim the
rights to Mein Kampf in all languages but English and Dutch, for
example, and they occasionally sue to prevent it being published (see
[[Mein Kampf]] article). But I've never heard them do anything like
that with photographs (and their suits seem to be based more on the
desire to not spread the information than a concern with copyright
infringement).
Again, to my knowledge nobody has ever been sued over Nazi photograph
copyrights in the post-WWII era. I use it as an example because there
has been a lot of text spilled about this issue in the past on the
Wiki awhile back. In situations like this I think it would be easy to
have highly specialized categories of "super-low-risk fair use"
claims, like one for Nazi photographs.
FF