It seems that, without announcement, Historic England have now dropped the claim that copyright-expired pre-June 1957 RAF images are still in copyright, from their Aerial Photo Explorer.
They still prevent users from downloading them.
On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 11:30, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
There has been much in the press and social media in recent days about a new "Aerial Photograph EXplorer" made by Historic England [1]. It is indeed a treasure trove of aerial photography, including the Aerofilms archive, much RAF imagery, and more recent equivalents.
Some of the material on the site, particularly RAF imagery made before 30 June 1957, is out of copyright [2] and could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. However, trying to save those images from their individual pages (by right clicking, in Windows) results in an interstitial stating "This image is copyrighted" [3].
[1] https://historicengland.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.htm
[2] "Crown copyright photographs created prior to 30 June 1957 have a copyright term of 50 years from creation." - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/Unit...
[3] Example: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/aerial-photo...
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk