Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Wouldn't it belong to his heirs?
Fred
> From: Sean Barrett
> I have a document created by a sailor in the [[Kriegsmarine]] during
> [[World War II]]. Thus, the document is approximately 60 years
> old, but
> its author didn't die until 1982. The document has no copyright
> notice
> associated with it and was never published until it was captured by
> the
> Allies after the war. I can justify a claim to fair use for
> Wikipedia's
> purposes, but I'd like to determine what its copyright status
> really is.
> Can anyone help me?
>
Who the copyright belongs to is a different issue.
I would venture to guess that the vast majority of material that is
protected by copyright lacks an owner who would have rights to be
protected.
I think there are almost always heirs, or the state, or whatever, but
in some
cases it would be a considerable effort to find out who it is. If you
recall
the NPG guy who sent us the nastygram about images of paintings,
part of his day job was to track down copyright owners, because the
NPGs makes millions of dollars from their holdings, and a copyright
owner could surface and demand a piece of the action. In our case, it's
hardly worth spending much time on the research, even on a volunteer
basis, since we're not making any money from the copyrighted work;
if an owner ever shows up and decides that the old document is
somehow a moneymaker, the most we would need to do is to take it down.
So we should just be able to tag things as "copyright owner unknown" and
leave it at that.
I would be comfortable with that, but I fear that I am in the minority.
What's more common is material that comes out with no notice
whatsoever. It leaves me with the impression that our contributor has
done no homework at all. The rest of us should not have to do someone
else's due diligence.
Ec