A Question Asked in Ignorance

[Mark Roth]

I have a question that I am asking out of pure ignorance. I mean no ill intent nor any offense, I simply have no idea of what is happening...

After an absence of several months (well, my entire school year), I have resumed perusing and occasionally posting on this fine forum. Since my return, I have noticed that several images have disappeared, including at least one that I myself posted, a photograph I personally took. This may be an irrelevant observation unrelated to my actual question; perhaps simply an issue of storage space.

My actual questions are these:

There seems to me to be a growing concern over the use of photographs on and/or from this site. Are there real problems with people stealing and reusing photographs, presumably without properly attributing them? It seems utterly plausible for this to be the case. I believe I found this website while searching Civil War images and found some of the largest results coming from CWT threads.

My last question is a simple one, again asked in ignorance. Other than the work put into digitizing and restoring an image, how can there be copyrights to photographs that are 150+ years old? (Obviously colorized, annotated, or photos enhanced to prove a point would not count)

 

[GS]

Copyright laws date from the early 20th Century. Most if not all CW photos should/would be in public domain; however, if found through Library of Congress archives collections, for example, they should be credited.

 

[bdtex]

Are there real problems with people stealing and reusing photographs, presumably without properly attributing them?

Some months back,a software update in the forum kinda went awry and some images were lost in the process.

 

[Mike Serpa]

I've seen several examples of colorized used on other sites without links or credit given. A couple photos I cleaned up were posted on other sites without links or credit.

 

[WJC]

I have a question that I am asking out of pure ignorance.

The only "pure ignorance" is not asking questions.
I learned from your question and I am sure others did too. Keep the questions coming!

 

[John Winn]

Copyright law can be a bit complicated because there have been a number of changes over the years and so the length of a copyright depends on when the photo was taken and, in some cases, if it was published but if the photo was taken before 1923 there's no copyright unless the photo has been "substantially" enhanced. There are exceptions for "fair use" too although that's generally for educational purposes and by non-profit organizations. Any image belonging to the government is public domain.

I think the concern that web site owners have is that they don't want to have to check every image posted and try to figure out if there's a copyright so they just require that credit be given.

I'm not an attorney but my wife is a photographer and this comes up in her circles a lot. There's good info on the internet; just do some Googling if you really want to know.