Hi all,

There was some discussion of orphan works in Wikimedia UK when the new legislation was introduced in May 2015. Please check government guidance in this. Unfortunately the new regulations are not very favourable to us. Arguing that creating exact copies created a new copyright would be counterproductive as regards the use of non-orphan work that has become public domain and copied by whoever.

all the best

Fabian

aka Leutha

On 15 October 2016 at 13:06 John Lubbock <john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

Could they not be declared orphan works if there was some due diligence
done to establish that the original authors could not be found? Couldn't
you argue that the authorisation for making a copy of the originals
produced a new copyright which was held by the museum? Presumably if
someone's grandfather left them the collection, it's their copyright to
release, but if a copy of the image was made in 1970 then surely the
copyright on that copy is the museum's? I've been trying to understand
copyright for years now and it's still a bit of a mystery to me. Especially
with photos it seems flexible to an extent.

On 14 October 2016 at 09:15, Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers@gmail.com>
wrote:

Fæ would be my first suggestion for a mass upload if he is available and
the collection is suitable. But reading through that link I'm not sure we
can use that collection. Apparently it was started forty years ago by a
curator who invited people to bring in historic photos and lend them to the
museum to make a copy.

I'm sure that's fine for the Museum to use. But I wouldn't care to argue
on Commons that this constitutes a CC-BY-SA 3 licence for all those images.
Hopefully there will be a subset which can be dated early enough to argue
PD. Maybe there are some where the rights owner can be traced, but I'd
suspect there will be a lot of photographers from an era where some will
have died long enough ago to make it difficult to trace the heirs, and
others may even still be with us. At some point in the future no doubt we
can import the lot, provided a digital copy is still extant.

Another reason why the movement needs a sealed repository from which stuff
can be migrated when it is out of copyright.

Depending on the age range of the images and the quality of the metadata
there could be a useful proportion that would be safe to upload. It all
depends on the ratio of "my grandfather died in 1880 and left us this
collection" to "my grandfather died in 1980 and left us this collection".

WSC

On 14 Oct 2016, at 08:18, <rod@rodspace.co.uk> <rod@rodspace.co.uk> wrote:

Hi all,

I have just spotted an announcement of a historic photograph digitisation
project by the friends of the Somerset Life Museum Research Group (see
https://somersetrurallifemuseum.org.uk/2016/10/13/digitisation-project/ )
aiming to digitise 15,000 images.

I have made an initial contact asking about licencing and sharing and
mentioned “mass uploads” but I know very little about this. I believe there
have been some people who have done this for/with other GLAMS and/or
developed tools to handle this. Who would be the best person to put them in
touch with if they come back to me and they are willing to release under a
suitable licence?

Rod

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