[WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

[Ray Saintonge]

Rory Stolzenberg wrote:

>On 9/9/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>On 9/9/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>If the original author doesn't care about attribution, or their rights
>>>as photographer, or what happens to the image, then get them to assign
>>>the copyright to someone else in a deed. Then the other person can do
>>>whatever they want with the image, since they own the copyright.
>>>      
>>>
>>Copyright assignment might work.  But is the listed source supposed to
>>be the author or the copyright holder?
>>
>Usually it's both since they're one and the same, but we actually want the
>copyright holder.  It doesn't matter to us who took it, only who owns it,
>since that's who would be using the license that we have to know. Same with
>fair use images; we want to know the copyright holder, not some random
>website with the image (though that is helpful if it says who the copyright
>owner is).
>
Who owns the copyright is clearly more important than who owns the 
picture or who physically took the picture.  Former copyright ownership 
should even be shown for PD images to help establish that they are in 
fact PD.

Grandma's assignment could be a positive step forward, but asking her to 
do that doesn't help if grandma's dead.  The problem could continue for 
another 70 years.  While she was alive grandma was never concerned about 
who took the pictures in the family album, and the copyrights that might 
go along with those pictures.  She never bothered to make a will, 
because she never had anything of monetary value.  In the simplest 
posthumous situation grandma had two children, who are both still alive, 
but can't get along with each other on anything.  One wants to protect 
what he believes to be the sacred memory of grandma by allowing nothing 
to be made public; the other considers it a celebration of grandma to 
publish everything.  As the number of children and grandchildren 
increases things can only get worse.  In fact, any one of the children 
(and any one of the grandchildren whose parent is deceased) can release 
the material without regard to the others' claims of copyright.

Ec