On 5/10/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net>
wrote:
While there is an author and the "heirs and
assigns" (a debtor for
example) of an organization which may have legal claims there is
miniscule chance that any of them would come forth. I know of no
clause which excludes illegal publications from copyright protection.
If the article has substantial historical importance it would fall
under fair use.
My thought was that the copyright in the US might have elapsed due to
publication without a copyright notice. But that's dependent on the
status in the country of first publication, unless the work was
published in the US within 30 days of that.
OTOH, it would be tempting to use the strategy of "just do it and see
if anyone complains", especially as this work seems to be the type
that would stand alone and not taint other parts of the corpus.
In 1943 Palestine was still under British occupation. The Ottomans were
already out of there. Successor legislation would lie either with
Jordan or Israel. Life +50 should apply if the newspaper was published
in Jordan or the Occupied Territories; life + 70 should apply in Israel
proper.
The illegality of the publication should not affect things unless the
publication was itself a copyright violation. Another thing to look at
is whether the authors are given personal credit for their work, or
whether the entire publication is really the work of one identified
person. In such cases one might need to check on what happened to the
author.
Ec