Copyright of pics

[armourersergeant]

Can a Pal enlighten me as to the do's and donts of posting pictures that say i have photocopied from documents at the Pro or IWM. As the 'owner' as such is dead is this in breech of copyright?

To take an example i have a pic of General Snow, taken from his letters home to his wife during WW1. according to Pics archive they have nothing of him, as obviously they have his memiors recorded as just that, written not pictorial. So i photo his image and they ask if i will be using this info for publication, of which i do not believe i will, but does posting it on a forum constitute publishing and thus breech of their conditions given that anybody can then copy it and use it as they wish.

The same can be said for pics from books etc used on forum to help explain uniforms etc.

wondering

Arm.

[mordac]

Hi Arm:

The attached document might be helpful.

Garth

Copyright.pdf

[armourersergeant]

thanks Mordac,

When i have a spare day i will read and divulge the contents

But if any others can save me the effort please post with idiot proof version.

Ta

Arm.

[Annette Burgoyne]

Hi Arm

I am not that up on copyright but if your picture as come from a place like the PRO or I.W.M. and you have signed one of their forms (I have to sign some form or another when copying anything at my research centre), then I think you are breaking their copyright by posting it but I am sure someone will tell me I'am wrong. I did read a bit of document Garth attached.

Annette

[Chris_Baker]

There is a difference between copyright and reproduction rights. You can buy and own a picture - even something like a unique work of art, let alone a copy of a photo from IWM - but still not have reproduction rights for it. In general, you should assume that you do not have reproduction rights.

Having said that, there is unlikely to be a difficulty if you are publishing say an old photo or postcard...unless you have acquired your copy from an archive - such as IWM - where there is quite properly a requirement to protect rights.

So, my own rule of thumb which of course has no legal basis whatever...postcards, photos of old soldiers - OK to publish.

Copy of something from a book - not OK to publish.

Copy of an IWM photo - no chance.

And having said that, IWM have kindly granted me rights to reproduce some of their photo archive on the main website as long as (1) I buy a copy first, and (2) I watermark it and carry a caption such as the one shown here:

From the photographic archive of the Imperial War Museum, with permission: WAACs tending the graves of fallen British soldiers in a cemetery at Abbeville, 9 February 1918. Photograph by Second Lieutenant D McLellan. IWM negative Q8467.

[Terry Denham]

Chris is quite right about the difference between Copyright and Reproduction Rights.

Copyright for most works expires seventy years after the year of the death of the creator or the year of publication if there was no author. Crown Copyright is fifty years for published material but 125 years for unpublished material. Crown Copyright lasts seventy years if it is an author's work assigned to the Crown.

Having said that Reproduction Rights do not necesssarily expire at the same timeand can last virtually forever. Reproduction on the Internet does count as 'publishing'.

The copyright laws do allow certain uses by other people such as for review purposes or short extractions etc but Repro Rights do not.

This is the situation in the UK but other countries will have different laws.

[armourersergeant]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOps

Should i perhaps change my avtar then and hope the internet police do not catch me?

Arm

[Terry Denham]

Too late! They're just around the corner.

[john w.]

To me one of the most heinous crimes is to pass someone elses work off as your own. As has been said before, to use and acknowledge the source for no financial gain would be something that most institutions would not jump up and down about. The context is the catch I feel

John

[Terry Denham]

John

The problem is that most institutions own Reproduction Rights so that they get financial gain - from others using their material.

They cannot afford to let serious breaches of their rights go unchallenged and many employ people to watch out for this sort of thing. I make part of my living from a large company in the publishing world doing just that! (Totally unconnected with anything on this Forum I might add!)

Don't ever rely on an organisation accepting that you are a small guy just using a photo for fun. You may just turn out to be the one they decide to make an example of!

Intellectual Property Rights are big business - especially for owners of big collections of written or photographic material.

[Clive Maier]

Can a Pal enlighten me as to the do's and donts of posting pictures that say i have photocopied from documents at the Pro or IWM. As the 'owner' as such is dead is this in breech of copyright? ...

I have attempted an answer but it has turned into a bit of a screed. Does anyone want to be bothered with it? If so, Iwill post it. This is a complex field and gives rise to books inches thick, hence I went on a bit.

[john w.]

Terry

Understood, and as for intellectual property rights... yet another minefield.

I try in whatever I do to avoid these issues like the plague or just ask permission, if it costs to much, well thats it then look for something else.

John

[Dragon]

What is the situation if one wants to include in a message a quotation from a published work, eg three or four lines of a poem, or a couple of sentences of a prose text?

Is that ok, provided that the author and publisher are fully credited?

And - what about signature quotations (such as mine)?

Thank you.

Gwyn

[Clive Maier]

What is the situation if one wants to include in a message a quotation from a published work, eg three or four lines of a poem, or a couple of sentences of a prose text? ...

Gwyn,

I did cover that topic in my screed, so I am emboldened to post it below...

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, so don’t regard this as gospel. It is just what I know - or think I know - as a practising writer on technical and industrial matters. I will welcome corrections.

Unfortunately, copyright can’t be explained in a few words. It is a legal concept that protects some forms of intellectual property and has been drawn up to cover as many eventualities as possible, so there is a fair degree of complication. To add to the difficulties, copyright law varies from country to country. On the internet, where all the countries meet, the outcome is a mess.

Copyright covers original works. A work is generally an expression of some kind – a book, article, photograph, film, play, song – anything of that nature. You can’t copyright an idea. To protect an idea you need a patent. You can’t copyright a name or title. For that you need a trade mark. If you want a patent or trade mark, you have to do something to get it. Copyright by contrast is automatic. As soon as you create an original work, the copyright belongs to you the creator. There are no forms to fill in, no fees to pay, and the work does not have to carry any form of copyright notice. Generally, copyright in a work now lasts for the lifetime of the creator and for the 70 years following death.

Copyright is a form of property. This means it can be sold in whole or in part. The author of a popular book might sell the book publishing rights separately on different continents. The film rights would be another deal, and newspaper serialisation another. What’s actually happening is that the author of the work is selling portions of the copyright. The purchaser acquires that portion of the protection conferred by copyright. Of course, merely purchasing a copy of the book gives you no intellectual property rights at all.

So far it looks as if you are not free to do anything with the copyright work of other people without prior permission. The thing that changes all this is the concept of ‘fair use’ or ‘fair dealing’. Fair dealing is the term more commonly used in the UK. Fair dealing allows you to use minor portions of a copyright work without permission. For example, in writing a book you might draw upon a sentence or two from another work. For this to be fair dealing, the portion of the work used should be small, you should identify the author and the work, and in your use of the portion you should preferably have added some new insight or interpretation. In other words, and particularly when the portion is more substantial, you should have gone beyond mere copying.

Fair dealing is not a legal right but it is a defence. Because it is not a legal right, there is no clear rule about what is and is not fair dealing. If a dispute should arise a key test is whether your use of the portion is likely to deprive the copyright owner of income. The interpretation of fair use is more relaxed when the use of copyright material is for purposes such as private study, research or education. The safe way is always to gain permission first, but if this becomes a universal practice the valuable concession of fair dealing will wither away.

In the case of a photocopy or photograph (aka a digital copy) made by you in a library or archive, the terms of copying are likely to have limited you to personal use. In this case, it seems to me that you are now bound by a contract you have made with the library or archive – irrespective of copyright. The library or archive may or may not hold copyright on the items in its keeping. In most cases, it probably does not. But if it does hold copyright another question arises. Does posting a digital copy on the forum qualify as fair dealing? The answer seems to be a definite ‘No’, even if access to the forum is restricted.

A Great War photograph could have been made by a private individual or by a photographer employed for that purpose by a newspaper or other organisation. In the first case, copyright would belong to the photographer; in the second case it would belong to the employer. As time went by, the copyright could have been sold or inherited. For photographs published before mid-1957, the term of copyright is 70 years (Crown copyright 50 years) from the year of publication. For unpublished photographs created before mid-1957, the term of copyright is 70 years (Crown copyright 50 years) from the year of creation. So copyright has expired on unpublished Great War photographs, and may or may not have expired on published photographs.

There is a further complication. When copyright expires, the work passes into the public domain and you may make use of it without permission. Anyone can publish and profit from the work but the first to do so with an unpublished work automatically gains ‘publication rights’ that last for 25 years from the time of publication. Publication rights are much the same as copyright. Frankly, I don’t know whether this concept applies to photographs but I think it probably does. If so, an archive like IWM could gain rights on unpublished copyright-expired Great War photographs simply by publishing them.

Even if an archive does not hold copyright or publishing rights on a photograph it can still set terms when selling you a copy of the photograph. So again, you are now bound by a contract, irrespective of the presence or absence of rights.

In principle, you can’t do much in safety without permission. In practice, you are probably safe from repercussions unless you are blatantly exceeding fair dealing, especially if you are profiting from the use and therefore depriving the rights holder of profit.

One approach could be to ensure that any image you post on the forum is no bigger than the maximum set by Chris. This tends to keep the quality down and should help to establish that you had no intention to do anything other than draw attention to the original. Of course, there is no problem when posting your own photographs – of memorials for example - because you own the copyright. Remember though, that your photograph of a war diary page made for recording purposes does not constitute a new work in which you own copyright. It is a digital copy of the diary page.

There is excellent information about copyright and other forms of intellectual property protection on the pages of the Government-backed UK Intellectual Property on the Internet. The position from the point of view of an academic library is put very succinctly on pages from Middlesex University.

[armourersergeant]

Clive,

that has made a difficult subject and usually complicated to understand, literally crystal clear. I appreciate you are saying you may not be correct but i think if i follow these 'rules' i will not go far wrong.

Thanks

Arm.

[Annette Burgoyne]

Arm

you could get a pencil and draw Gen. Snow then you would not be breaking any rules

Annette

[Dragon]

Thank you for the comprehensive reply, Clive.

Do you think that I can infer that if I were to post a short quotation from a poem or a text, and acknowledged it fully, and added a reflection or two of my own in the message, it would be accepted as a reasonable use of someone else’s IP?

Otherwise, sometimes it would seem almost impossible to have some discussions, because a contributor couldn’t refer to published material except by paraphrase; and if s/he supplied only the line or page references, s/he couldn’t assume that readers would bother looking it up.

I realise that any reply you make will be qualified.

Gwyn

[Clive Maier]

... Do you think that I can infer that if I were to post a short quotation from a poem or a text, and acknowledged it fully, and added a reflection or two of my own in the message, it would be accepted as a reasonable use of someone else’s IP? ...

Gwyn,

Yes, this is absolutely OK. It goes on all the time in books and articles. It is what the concept of fair dealing is meant to legitimise.

You don't have to add your own original material directly to the quotation. It is enough that in your work you are seen to pursue your own agenda while pulling in the quotations as evidence or example.

Fiction excepted, everyone understands that you can't do anything without drawing on the work of others. I have never had a problem and I don't know anyone who has. I think you would have to be taking blatent advantage for anyone to raise an objection.

[Dragon]

I appreciate the prompt response, Clive.

I'm familiar with the concept of referencing material academically, but I wasn't sure how far the Internet and message forums required different practices. Thank you for clarifying.

I think I would actually be flattered if someone thought highly enough or was moved sufficiently by my fiction to wish to share it with others!

Gwyn

[Clive Maier]

I should have added that if you are thinking of writing a book for publication, you are likely to find that the publisher will require you get all the necessary permissions. This leaves you to decide which are 'necessary' and leaves you in the firing line if anything goes wrong. Even so, I don't think authors should be afraid to call upon the concept of fair dealing.

If you are writing for publication, I think it is worth tooling up with one or two books on copyright. The problem is to find books that are legally rigorous and are written in plain English. I don't know of any British examples but there are some from the USA where the law is not too different.

Both Getting Permission and The Copyright Handbook are easy for we non-legal types to read and understand.

If anyone knows of British equivalents I would be glad to hear about them.

[armourersergeant]

Annette you havent seen my drawing!!!!!

Arm.

[Clive Maier]

Again, I should have added that as the digital age continues to develop, so does the law and interpretation of copyright change in an attempt to keep up. Inevitably, the law lags. Changes are coming in response to the EU copyright Directive. The UK is running late on implementing this. There is information about the directive here and more good stuff about intellectual property here.