On 28 July 2017 at 21:36, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Nobody believes that claiming copyright on 2,000 year old works
And this is where your failure to understand English and Welsh law and the history of artifact handling become a problem.
Your mistake is in assuming the only work here is from the 2000 year old sculptor and bronze worker. This is of course not the case. The reality is both items will have been subject to a certain degree of cleaning and "restoration" (you don't give British museum catalogue numbers so I can't look up exactly what). This is pretty common for any ah "headline" item that didn't go straight from the dig to a museum. Victorian collectors wanted complete statues for their collection and even today things can get a lot of work done to them (the Crosby Garrett Helmet for example).
The Roman statue presumably entered the UK pre-1972 (if it didn't we have bigger concerns than copyright) which means there is a good chance it is from the imaginative restoration era. Has the restorer been dead for 70 years? I don't know and I don't think you do.
The jug won't have come out of the ground looking like that. Has enough work been done to qualify for copyright or is it old enough for life+70 to have expired? I don't know. Do you?