--- Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Can we use images from
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org
which are clearly im the PD by age, e.g., from the American Civil War?
IANAL but I'll talk about this anyway. :)
If the images are in the public domain, then, well, they are in the public domain. Any claim of ownership has no legal basis unless they somehow enhanced the images (which does not appear to be the case and the copyright would only cover the enhancements).
So yes, use them. But good academic practice would be to credit them as the source you copied from and provide a link back to their image metadata page for the image you copied. It would also be nice to have '(from the NYPL Digital Gallery)' in the caption of the image you use.
-- mav
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