Stan Shebs wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Wouldn't it belong to his heirs?
Fred
From: Sean Barrett I have a document created by a sailor in the [[Kriegsmarine]] during [[World War II]]. Thus, the document is approximately 60 years old, but its author didn't die until 1982. The document has no copyright notice associated with it and was never published until it was captured by the Allies after the war. I can justify a claim to fair use for Wikipedia's purposes, but I'd like to determine what its copyright status really is. Can anyone help me?
Who the copyright belongs to is a different issue.
I would venture to guess that the vast majority of material that is protected by copyright lacks an owner who would have rights to be protected.
I think there are almost always heirs, or the state, or whatever, but in some cases it would be a considerable effort to find out who it is. If you recall the NPG guy who sent us the nastygram about images of paintings, part of his day job was to track down copyright owners, because the NPGs makes millions of dollars from their holdings, and a copyright owner could surface and demand a piece of the action. In our case, it's hardly worth spending much time on the research, even on a volunteer basis, since we're not making any money from the copyrighted work; if an owner ever shows up and decides that the old document is somehow a moneymaker, the most we would need to do is to take it down.
So we should just be able to tag things as "copyright owner unknown" and leave it at that.
I would be comfortable with that, but I fear that I am in the minority. What's more common is material that comes out with no notice whatsoever. It leaves me with the impression that our contributor has done no homework at all. The rest of us should not have to do someone else's due diligence.
Ec