Next in an occasional series on copyright
We have all been there, done that, those of us who grew up in the United States.
On a day appointed, with black eyes, or braces, or missing front teeth, or hair that won’t behave, or the shirt our mothers detested, or an attitude that couldn’t be repressed, we have sat there on those chairs.
Glaring, staring, sometimes even smiling.
And had our pictures taken for the yearbook.
Only to find, all these years later, that somebody wants to digitize those yearbooks and put them on the internet.
Reader Gary Matz recognizes the genealogical value of yearbooks: any time you nail somebody’s feet to the floor at a particular time and place, it’s a good thing. And yearbooks often offer details about the person’s activities and interests that can’t be found anywhere else.
But when the genealogical library he works with is asked to copy a yearbook from a school or a college, he worries about copyright.
He wonders first if it’s an issue at all. “Since the public schools and colleges are taxpayer supported, can they have copyright or license rights on something they publish?” he asks. “Would private schools and colleges have rights?”
And if it is an issue, what does the library need to know?
As always, The Legal Genealogist offers kudos to Gary for realizing there could be copyright issues here. It’s an issue all too often overlooked. And the fact is, he’s right to be concerned.
First, let’s deal with the question of whether schools can have a copyright.
Simple one word answer: yes.
Doesn’t matter if they’re public or private, doesn’t matter if they get (or got) tax dollars. There’s no provision in the copyright law that says you do or don’t get copyright based on your status as a public entity.
The only provision anywhere in the law that carves out a whole category is in §105 of the copyright statute: “Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.”1
Under that section, any work created by an employee of the United States Government as part of his or her official duties for the government isn’t copyrighted. Note that doesn’t apply to state governments or county governments or — ahem — local school boards or college alumni associations.
So we have to start with the notion that yearbooks are — or were — copyrighted. And that means finding out, first and foremost, if they’re still copyrighted today.
And that’s not always so easy. Copyright law has changed from time to time and there are different rules that apply depending on when the yearbook was published. Let’s take a look at the key categories that are likely to apply to yearbooks published far enough back to have genealogical value:2
Publication Date |
Conditions |
Copyright Term |
| Before 1923 | None | In the public domain |
| 1923 – 1977 | No copyright notice. | In the public domain |
| 1923 – 1963 | There was a copyright notice but it was not renewed as required after 28 years. (Only a few publishers or authors ever renewed.) | In the public domain |
| 1923 – 1963 | There was a copyright notice and the copyright was renewed. | 95 years after publication date |
| 1964 – 1977 | There was a copyright notice. | 95 years after publication date |
And that’s the easy part. It gets more complicated after 1977, with all kinds of “if this-then that” situations, until you finally get to the point where copyright notice isn’t at issue any more and everything is automatically copyright protected. There’s a terrific chart with just about every possible combination of “if this-then that” situations by Peter B. Hirtle of Cornell University that we should all have bookmarked by now. It’s here: “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States.”
So when Gary asks if he should consult with the schools involved before copying a yearbook — and if we’re sitting out there thinking about putting our old yearbooks on our websites — part of the answer is in when it was published and whether it had the copyright notice required at the time. If it clearly is no longer copyright-protected, if it ever was protected, then the only reason to consult is courtesy, rather than law.
But if it isn’t clear that the yearbook is out of copyright, then consulting with the institution and its legal department is a really good idea. Because if it is still copyrighted, figuring out who owns the copyright may be harder than it seems.
You see, the usual rule is that the creator of a work owns the copyright.3 Easy enough: the school published it, right?
Not so fast.
There was a photographer, perhaps a photo studio, that took the individual pictures of the students, wasn’t there? Unless there was a contract between the photographer or the studio and the school, making it what’s called a work for hire, the copyright to those photos belongs to the photographer, not the school.4
And there were students who took some of the photos, of the student activities and clubs and sports events, weren’t there? Guess what? Same problem about ownership of the copyrights to those pictures.
All the school might have, depending on its arrangements with all the contributors, is what’s called a compilation copyright, and if so:
The copyright in a compilation of data extends only to the selection, coordination or arrangement of the materials or data, but not to the data itself. In the case of a collective work containing “preexisting works” — works that were previously published, previously registered, or in the public domain — the registration will only extend to the selection, coordination or arrangement of those works, not to the preexisting works themselves. If the works included in a collective work were not preexisting—not previously published, registered, or in the public domain or owned by a third part y— the registration may extend to those works in which the author of the collective work owns or has obtained all rights.5
In short, there are a lot of potential copyright problems in copying and republishing yearbooks. Consulting with a professional whenever the yearbook even possibly could still be in copyright is the only safe way to go.
We’ll leave to another day the pesky issue of what happens when one of those students doesn’t want that picture republished on the web…
SOURCES
- 17 U.S.C. §105. ↩
- Information for table drawn from Peter B. Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States,” Cornell Copyright Center (http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm : accessed 23 Mar 2014). ↩
- U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 1: Copyright Basics, PDF version at p. 2 (http://www.copyright.gov : accessed 19 Mar 2014). ↩
- See Judy G. Russell, “Copyright and the genealogy report,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 20 Nov 2013 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 23 Mar 2014). ↩
- U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 14: Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations, PDF version at p. 2 (http://www.copyright.gov : accessed 23 Mar 2014). ↩
All I know is, one of the commercial class-reuniting sites has uploaded my senior yearbook, of which I was the editor in 1982. It seems to me that such is not fair use. They seem to have done most of the school’s books in a run.
D.
There’s no way that copying an entire yearbook would constitute fair use, Dave. Not a chance. That then brings up the “who owns the copyright(s)” question — and whether anybody was even asked for permission.
Dave, that’s disgusting. I would contact my alma mater about this.
Judy, thank you for yet another illuminating post.
Great question! I wish I had known you back in 2003. I had classmates requesting copies of our 1963 yearbook. I felt there could be copyright problems in xeroxing the books. I contacted the publisher of our yearbook and asked if we could get copies or make our own. They told me we could run off copies of the yearbooks. Our yearbooks file was long gone. It never occurred to me that the school should have been contacted for their permission to copy the book. As to a “model” release? Again, never occurred to me. But, as to the student yearbook staff photographer, doesn’t their work belong to the school rather than the individual student?
>> as to the student yearbook staff photographer, doesn’t their work belong to the school rather than the individual student?
You know what my answer to that is going to be: it depends! The blog post in footnote 4 on genealogy reports will give you some references to consider.
Thank you, Judy. BTW, I shared your blog about the yearbooks and copy rights to our district’s Director of Community Relations, which is a huge umbrella that includes alumni reunions & yearbooks. Pat
You’re most welcome.
Judy –
Just a quick heads up to let you know that the link in footnote 4 doesn’t work, it gives an “Error 404”.
The same error occurs, by the way, when I click on the slideshow frames on your home page.
Thanks for the heads up. Blog post fixed, now off to look at the rest of the code!
Helpful and timely post – I was just sitting down to write about my great-grandparents’ appearances in their high school yearbooks (1920s). Thanks for sharing the handy table!
Judy:
Would the holder of the ‘compilation copyright’ have the legal right to republish the entire work? Besides the answer of ‘it depends’ of course 🙂
I was thinking of either the school or publisher generating a reprint (either in print or electronically) of the entire yearbook. Likewise, how would this compare to a society newsletter or journal? Does the society hold a compilation copyright to the compiled work and have the right to reprint entire issues?
I hate to say “it depends,” Randy (that, of course, is a fib: lawyers LOVE to say “it depends”).
But that’s the only possible answer. Most initial agreements for publication — say, the contract between the photograph and the school or between a society and an author of a journal article — specified print rights. Few older contracts even considered the possibility of electronic publishing. That’s a horse of a different color and generally is not considered to be part of an initial license to publish. If the underlying copyright was actually assigned, or if the contract was broad enough to be read as unlimited, that’s another story. So it’s always going to be case-by-case or, to use a phrase, “it depends.”
Another great discussion of the myriad copyright issues involved in something that seems so simple. One further issue that occurs to me: when we copy and paste those pictures from yearbooks that we find, e.g., on ancestry.com, are we engaging in fair use? Does ancestry.com’s license to use the material cover such uses by its members? If I go beyond attaching it to my tree and download it to send to someone else or to post on my blog, have I exceeded that license? Is it fair use?
Always so much to talk about. And if I were teaching copyright law one more time, lots of good exam questions here! 🙂
Amy, you know only too well that the answer is gonna be (one more time, all together now): it depends. First and foremost, is the material still copyrighted by anyone? If not, then no problem with any use we make of it (subject, always, to the website’s terms of use). If it is still copyrighted, what rights if any does Ancestry have — and what rights can it share with its subscribers?
Amy,
This is what Ancestry says:
“The Website contains graphics, information, data, user generated information, editorial and other content accessible by Users (the “Content”). Except for Web Records, which are governed by the third parties that host the records, all Content is owned, licensed to and/or copyrighted by Ancestry and may be used only in accordance with this limited use license. The Website is protected by copyright as a collective work and/or compilation, pursuant to U.S. copyright laws, international conventions, and other copyright laws.”
“You may access the Website, use the graphics, information, data, editorial and other Content only for personal or professional family history research, and download Content only as search results relevant to that research. The Content may be downloaded onto mobile devices or desktop through the use of authorized Ancestry software. When downloaded, the Content remains subject to the limited use license contained in this Agreement. You may use the software provided on the Website only while online and may not download, copy, reuse or distribute that software, except where it is clearly stated that such software is made available for offline use. Ancestry and its licensors retain title, ownership and all other rights and interests in and to all information and Content on the Website. Bots, crawlers, spiders, data miners, scraping and any other automatic access tool are expressly prohibited. Violation of this limited use license may result in immediate termination of your membership and may result in legal action against you.”
I’ll defer to you and Judy as to what, exactly, that means with regard to your Ancestry question.
I am too a yearbook editor for my high school. I took most of casual photographs that appear in it along with other photographers on my staff. The format, photographs and words use had to be approved by me.
When classmate.com bought the use of it from one of my classmates, I was not consulted. The yearbook on line is shown with many handwritten notes from classmates wishing the same trivial congratulations. I was told in a round about way that changed the overall rights to published the book. I disputed it! I wrote an open email to all and brought it up in the genealogy world but did not get any response.
I am grateful you submitted an article on it. I was going to offer the competing companies the use of my extra copies of mine that have not be written in to copy so that there would be a better copy to view, but have held out for some reasons.
I am like most genealogist, happy to find photographs and information from the past, but unhappy that no one ask if it was right!
I am in a quandary not knowing where to lean on the subject!
Fundamentally, if you want to fight this, you need to talk to a copyright lawyer.
I am replying to my own message to say that I have benefited from my father-in-law yearbooks online. He has dementia! When I found them online, I shared them with him and he lit up telling me stories like it was just yesterday. I shared them with him every chance I have, since his short term memory has gone and I don’t mind hearing the same story over and over.
I thank the community who post it thru http://usgenweb.org/ and ancestry.com for having the other years.
Sweet that it worked like that for your father-in-law.
My issue with digitizing yearbooks is moral, not legal. In college the majority of students were legal adults. You could say that was fair game. In high school they are still children. I have seen (don’t remember where) talk of putting elementary school yearbooks on line as well.
As we do in genealogy when we put our ancestors into the perspective of their time, I think we should keep in mind our own. Even though they were not private photos, we did not take school pictures with the knowledge that they could one day be seen by the whole world. Though that child may well be into adulthood now, it feels like our right, or our parents right to choose has been taken away.
For those yearbooks done “before internet”, as a genealogist, as bad as I hate to say it, I wish they were not put online until after the people in them were deceased.
Judy, I enjoy reading you blog every day. You have the great ability of teaching like a friend telling a story!
Thanks for the kind words.
Hmmm, my wife’s g-grandfather was the photographer “of record” (so to say) for about 30+ years here in town, for most of the schools. For all I know, he may even have been the one who took my pictures when I was in elementary school.
Do you suppose the schools would have any records after all this time about contracts?
My wife is his only living direct descendent, so that could possibly make her a copyright holder of 30+ years of school photos? If there was a copyright notice (by him – not the school)? And IF it was renewed?
Do I have the “it depends” clauses in line correctly?
Dan
You do — and she might be! It’d sure be worth checking with the school on the contracts, mostly for the signatures and things reflected there.
I’m a professional photographer with campus, event, and sports photos in many yearbooks in the era discussed in this article. I definetly still own the copyrights to all my photos. I granted those yearbooks a singlular right to use the photos in a limited distribution single run publication. That grant does not carry over to any form of reproduction, especially not a for profit use by classmates or e-yearbooks. The challenge for us pros is the cost of making claims and recovering sufficient damages to make a challenge financially viable. This is what these guys count on when doing these projects.
That was the provision in your contract, Jerry, or in cases where there is no contract mentioning copyright in the years since the rule changed and work wasn’t so readily considered a work for hire. But it may not be true in all cases.
You said “We’ll leave to another day the pesky issue of what happens when one of those students doesn’t want that picture republished on the web…” The local public library has digitized three high school yearbooks for their online archives with my pictures in them (1966 – 1968) and which are searchable using my name. I object, as I feel this is a violation of my privacy. I rather doubt there was even a written release in those days signed by my parents to have my picture appear in the yearbooks, and certainly no one was consulted when these were digitized by the library. In any case, these books were created for students and school staff, not the general public, and we were minors at the time. I just fired off an email to the archivists asking them to remove my picture. We shall see what happens.
Everyone has a different view of this issue — mine is that it’s public history.
I just came across this issue last night, being exceedingly appalled by the activities of Classmates.com. There have been some interesting comments on here, including the most recent from Judy. And, Judy, while you may consider it public history, publishing a copyrighted work involves legal issues beyond the consideration of any one particular person or view.
Someone else made a comment about Classmates.com buying the rights from a student. I very much doubt such a purchase was made. No particular student, (unless that student somehow holds all the necessary copyrights) could sell such rights to Classmates.com.
And to me, one of the biggest issues is that we’re talking about material that involves minors in most cases and very young children in some cases. Anything involving children ought to be done with extra care. Instead, we see companies/websites like Classmates.com showing careless disregard. I would suggest this rises to the level of “depraved indifference”.
I have already begun exploring a number of options to combat this absolute atrocity of fraudulent, negligent, and illegal business activity, including opportunity for a massive class action suit to stop this from happening further.
Classmates.com isn’t the first company I’ve seen who seem to think that the ability to get their hands on an item constitutes legal permission to make money from it. This reminds me of another sad entity called MyLife who actually thinks (or at least did think) that the public accessibility of material constituted “public domain”.
What I think we see is companies who know what they’re doing is wrong but gamble on no one calling them into question sufficiently to force them to stop. All it takes is for good people to do nothing …..
You’re taking my comment out of context. It was solely on the question of whether an additional permission was required from the subject of the photo, not as if that overrode copyright concerns. The copyright issue comes first. Then you have to (or anyone who wants to republish has to) deal with the issue of permissions.
I’m a trustee of a public library that has digitzed about 70 years worth of local high school yearbooks. We recently tackled the “pesky issue” of a grad who wants her image and info blocked from the web. I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Has “another day” arrived yet?
I am very torn on this, despite the generally benign nature of these sorts of postings, because there are some very real very legitimate reasons why people may not want to have their images and information posted online. There are some very real dangers of stalkers and others that may be inflamed even by photos from years ago. I personally would draw the line between the living and the dead: the dead do not have a right of privacy, and their safety can’t be threatened. For the living, if any living person objects — take it down. Just my personal opinion, of course. But that’s my take on it.
I finally got a response to my query about putting my mom’s 1944 Philomath (Framingham High School) online:
“Sorry, it took us a few days to get this info together. In terms of the copyright for the yearbook, it’s treated as a serial/journal, rather than a stand-alone book for each year. So, the book you are looking at is still under copyright despite its advanced age. I spoke to Jeremy, the yearbook advisor, and he said that you could digitize and post online sections relevant to specific genealogy projects, but it couldn’t be more than half of a particular yearbook.
For a little bit of back-story, we are struggling to keep the budget afloat for an annual print run of the current FHS yearbook without charging astronomical prices to students. It is Jeremy’s goal to eventually digitize the back issues of the yearbook and make them available behind a pay wall to help defray student prices, so we’re trying to stem the tide of others copying and posting the whole yearbook and rendering that project moot.
Thanks for your interest, and let me know if you need any other help. If you’re in the area, we hold all the FHS yearbooks back to the 1920s in the Library, and you’re welcome to come take a look at any of them.”
That’s as good an answer as you could hope for.
So, just to be clear, if the yearbooks do not have an actual copyright notice and were published before 1977, they are public domain. And, prior to 1977, copyright notice required the use of ‘the letter c in a circle.’ If they yearbook is 1977 and earlier, and does not have the copyright symbol, it is not protected under copyright.
Of course, you may still run into objection from individuals with regards to privacy, but the digitizing and posting online can take place.
I just need a few pictures from the yearbooksame to include in a book I am writing. Is this permissible?
It depends! Who owns the copyright on those photos?
I know this post is old, but I’m quite concerned about whether I can send my yearbooks to Ancestry.com. I’ve seen so many yearbooks reprinted on different websites, but absolutely positively FACEBOOK. What about copyright on THAT site? The WORST site in the world for privacy and/or legal issues regarding copyright is Facebook. Would appreciate a heads up on this.
You can give your copies of your yearbooks to anyone; whether they can be reprinted is the issue.
What are your feelings towards OCI and their process? They’re willing to digitize high school yearbooks with OCR at no charge…BUT they get to keep a copy for their archive. Our digitized copies would be for in-house use only, not available online. However, their access to a copy for archival use, and the possibility that they may sell it, is what is giving me pause.
Without seeing the exact language of the contract, I don’t know how much of a risk this would pose.
Glad to see this post is still going…kinda a weird question: a few years ago I answered an ad ‘cash for old yearbooks’ – since my last couple years’ couple high school yearbooks were sitting on the shelf collecting dust, I thought I’d sell them. I got the surprise of my life when I saw that ‘Classmates.com’ had gotten hold of them & published them online! How did I know they were mine?? Cause the inscriptions my friends had written could be seen! Ugh.. So, I guess my stupidity led me on this boneheaded adventure :/
I’m just wondering how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 affects the issue of copyright for digital archives of yearbooks in a public school library. We have recently been considering using OCI’s free services to digitize yearbooks from 1950-1990 and have gotten clarification from them regarding their “business model” which does NOT involve selling digital records to for-profit organizations. OCI retains rights to materials in order to promote their business which is simply digitizing yearbooks for high schools, libraries, and other archival institutions. As I understand it they have a grant which limits the type of business model they have to one of public service (aka not-for-profit which precludes them from selling to for-profits).
In any event, I wondered if the copyright issue in this particular situation might be more cut and dry (or at least as cut and dry as a copyright issue could be!).
Because I don’t maintain a current law license and am not licensed in your state, I really can’t cross the line from discussing copyright as it impacts genealogical research to offering legal advice. Your right to digitize these yearbooks and what vendor you could legally use for that purpose is something your school attorney needs to address.
‘We’ll leave to another day the pesky issue of what happens when one of those students doesn’t want that picture republished on the web…’
Like me!
When I found out that my former high school was putting theirs online, I created more stink than Pepe’ LePew about it.
Their contact person told me that I couldn’t do a thing about it and ended the call by saying I was a kook, God Bless the friends I hang around with — ATTORNEYS!
I called one of my good friends and told him what was troubling me and within two hours I got a call back from the school’s contact person who apologized for telling me that I couldn’t do a thing and that I wasn’t a kook. He would promptly remove my image from all of the yearbooks and to have a nice day — with him now addressing by ‘Mr…’
Within two days, it was gone!
Talked to my friend later, he put the Fear of God into that guy, seems that my old high school isn’t anxious to become the test for who owns what.
Another positive, the school took my name off their mailing list!
I’m looking at the pre 1977 yearbooks to determine copyright notice. If there is a front page saying “Published by the senior class of 19%%”, does that count as a copyright notice? What would the copyright concerns be if it does?
The law itself specifies the form of a copyright notice. Under both the Copyright Act of 1909 and its successor act of 1976, the word copyright (or an abbreviation or symbol) with the year and name of the copyright owner are required to make the notice effective (although the notice itself has not been required since 1989).
If a good ambulance-chaser could rustle up a few hundred aggrieved people, whether students depicted in yearbooks, student photographers, or photo studios, they’d have the start of a HUGE nationwide class-action against Classmates.com. As an Alumni Association officer, I used OCI to scan our high school’s book archive. Although OCI’s agreement included “OCI complies with any and all federal copyright laws and regulations,” their verbiage about potential transfer to “other agencies or vendors” (no specific mention of Classmates.com) gave them a nice loophole. I only found out about the warden’s sweetheart deal when someone bought one of Classmates.com’s reproductions and showed a few pages on Facebook, and I instantly recognized the OCI page formatting.
I was just wondering if there has been any legal movement on the use of yearbooks for school purposes (marketing, etc.) and news media.
Once upon a time, yearbooks didn’t have much value to a school district until three things happened;
1) News organizations viciously went after yearbooks when some newsworthy event happened to a person (Monica Lewinsky was the first one I know of, but it has happened to others recently – albeit they were collage yearbooks). I know the media also looked at them to find people who went to school with the ‘mark’ and get some dirt on them, some of those vipers went as far as to offer up some obscure VHS tape of the target, which I know upset the videographers as they screamed ‘copyright’ as their product was displayed on TV without them being paid for it;
2) They suddenly became ‘valuable’ as many school districts were forced to face something that they though they would never have to do, and that was called ‘marketing’ thanks to ‘open enrollment’. ‘Open enrollment’ was going to require them to show prospective students why they should go to their school instead of their hometown one (especially if they were good at a particular sport). Yearbooks were lavishly featured on videos showing the ‘history’ of their school and picking out former students who went on to fulfilling lives;
3) Money. School districts, interested in being able to cash in on something they ‘owned’, started prostituting this new-found product for money. Some put it on their website under a paywall so that they can profit.
I was 17 when I graduated, so I couldn’t have given permission for its use outside of it being a ‘book’. Nobody would have guessed that the yearbook would have been turned into another format and be so shared among the world. I can’t imagine that a parent would have had the right to waive the rights of their child on the different formats that have since evolved.
As an independent photographer and contributor to many high school and college yearbooks dating back to the early 70’s, I see many recent examples of third parties now making commercial use of — and profiting from — my work, by reselling either or both electronic or physical copies of those yearbooks. My terms were for a one time use in a one time print publication. I never granted permission to anyone for my work to be used for their commercial profit, nor did any of these commercial organizations ever reached out to me for copy permissions even though I am credited as a photographer in many of them.
Here’s the challenge. I could sue and probably even win a few. Unfortunately the damages I can claim are so small and likewise the revenue attribute to my work in the overall copied work is also so small, that whatever I won wouldn’t even cover court costs. Or for that matter my own time and effort to find and document the violations.
So these commercial for profit organizations are just going to keep on doing what they’re doing without any regard for all of us that still own the original content.
The only good that I see coming out of all this, is that all these old yearbooks are getting digitally archived for posterity.
Joe the Photographer said: >So these commercial for profit organizations are just going to keep on doing what they’re doing without any regard for all of us that still own the original content.
I’m surprised that PPA doesn’t weigh in on the matter. They were absolutely anal on making sure the one-hour photo shops didn’t copy professional photos (I worked at one – it was absolutely drilled into the staff about the dangers of copying copyrighted works). I know that the now obsolete wedding videographers wanted the PPA counterpart (which I suspect are also obsolete) to be as diligent but – for whatever reason – they either didn’t have the power – or the stomach – to do that.
I always was impressed with what I call the ‘Disn*y Model’ in that they pursue *each* and *every* violation with the vigor of winning a contest – no matter how small of the ‘prize’. An acquaintance of mine many years ago (he’s now dead) told me when he worked at a very large global company that it was decided early on that if someone wronged their company, that company would spend a million dollars to collect 10₵. At first brush it doesn’t seem to make any sense but the idea was that it taught the rest of the ‘mice’ that ‘very large global company’ isn’t going to screw around, thereby saving them money in the end.
Joe the Photographer also said: >The only good that I see coming out of all this, is that all these old yearbooks are getting digitally archived for posterity.
I’ll pass…
1. How can a kid who is less than 18 have the legal comprehension to know what he is giving away when he/she gives away the rights to their own photo?
2. If you use a single photo from a yearbook, how can the holder of the copyright prove definitively that the photo was taken from the book? The user can simply claim that he took the photo himself and saved it all those years.
(a) It’d be the parents, not the kid, whose permission would matter. (b) As a photographer, let me assure you it’s not that hard to prove that photo is from that book.
Back in the days of old, permission wasn’t obtained by the parents, the only one that our school got permission from was the photographer, I remember my photographer had to sign off as I didn’t use the ‘official’ outfit that the school used. Part of the agreement between the photographer and the school was that the school could use the image as they saw fit (it’s different today).
To flesh out the continuing effects of having a guardian sign off is that I’m sure that person didn’t foresee the possible long-term ramifications of that decision as this isn’t like a normal release of ‘junior’ going on a field trip where there was a finite beginning (when ‘junior’ hopped on the bus) to a finite end (when it concluded). This puppy is living on decades later in directions that nobody ever envisioned it going.
I maintain that a school shouldn’t have the right to shag a product that up to a couple of decades ago was generally viewed to be of limited value. I didn’t have an issue with it until I saw what happened to Monica Lewinski with video and then what happened to US Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and Virginia State Governor Northam within the last couple of years.
As an aside, as much flack Bartram Trail High School in Florida got for editing photos of girls with various stages of exposed cleavages in their yearbook, I can understand why they did it. Somebody there was afraid of possible future backlash that could of erupted, putting them in a position of expensive litigation.
Until the law catches up with who owns what and what they can do with it, it’s going to be a hot potato…
Hey Judy, So I picked up a couple of yearbooks from the Fort Leonard Wood Army Training Center from the 1960s. I wanted to scan the picture of the graduates to put up publicly for anyone who may have had relatives who attended. I checked throughout the books and there is no mention of a copyright nor anything about a photographer. Would it be safe to post just the pages of the graduates or should I try contacting Fort Leonard Wood?
From a purely copyright perspective, something published in the US without a copyright notice before 1977 is in the public domain. (See https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain) But do consider privacy issues… Not everybody wants their yearbook pictures online.