[Commons-l] 100 years old images

[Andrew Gray]

2008/5/15 Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de>:

> cases, but not all. Consider this case: someone finds an image on commons which
> is labeled PD, and decides to use it as a book cover. After the book has been
> published, it turns out that it's not PD at all, and the copyright holder sues
> the book's author/publisher for 100k$ and wins. The books publisher then turns
> on us (the foundation, the uploader, the reviewing admins) for compensation. Do
> we have legal safeguards against that case? I don't think we do. But it's a
> question for the lawyers, I guess.

Publishers are already this paranoid :-) I've seen quite a few
exchanges with OTRS which boil down to:

"Can I have permission to use X image?"
"You don't need permission, it's public domain"
"Please show us the paperwork..." [or] "We'd still like your agreement"

> Anyway, we had the "draw the line somewhere" discussion repeatedly before, in
> all length and width, with, as far as I know, no definite outcome, besides maybe
> that 200 years are probably enough.

Definitely enough. The worst-case scenario I can imagine is the
juvenile work of a very long-lived author in a country with life+70.

Work created at 15; author survives to 100; that's date of creation
plus 85. Then another seventy years, total of plus 155.

I think we can safely say that anything over 120 is broadly likely to
be public domain; anything over 150 is almost certainly public domain;
by 170 it's virtually a cast-iron guarantee. Big caveat, as usual,
with French works and those weird wartime extensions.

However! This is vastly, vastly, *vastly* complicated by the
unpublished works rule, which gives a varying degree of protection
based on *date of publication* not of author's copyright, and so we
need to show it was published quite a while back...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
 andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk