Re: rights for defunct newspaper?

Hi There

In the UK (assuming this company was LLC or an LLC as its known in the States) companies assets including copyright and Intellectual property are automatically transferred to the government upon company dissolution, under the "Bonna Vacantia" (vacant goods) rule. Assuming that the laws of each country are similar then the answer depends on a few things.
1: When the paper closed was the company bankrupted? 2: If they ceased trading did anyone assign the assets prior to dissolution? As I have said I'm not sure what the law is in other countries though, maybe someone could explain what happens to a dissolved company's assets in the States and Canada?
I'm curious as to whether its different from country to country, given that we are all under the Berne convention.
As you can probably tell I'm not Lawyer this is just an area of law that I have been involved with a lot recently.

Kind Regards

Jake
----- Original Message -----
From: "Millward, Debbie (VAN_Exchange)" <DMillward[_at_]png.canwest.com> To: "CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property" <CNI-COPYRIGHT[_at_]cni.org>
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 1:50 AM
Subject: [CNI-(C)] rights for defunct newspaper?

> (Canadian question, but answers from US copyright perspective might
apply):
>
> My understanding is that a newspaper as an organization owns the copyright
> of the photos taken by staff photographers in the course of employment at
> the newspaper. Presuming that's correct, what happens to ownership of
those
> photos when the newspaper ceases to exist, and isn't bought or absorbed by
> another company?
>
> A photo agency has an old photo in its files that they want permission to
> use, but the orginating newspaper folded in the 1980s. So who owns the
> rights to the photo(s) now?
>
> Thanks in advance for any opinions, from non-lawyers as they may be.
>
>
> Debbie Millward, MLS
> News Research Library Manager
> Vancouver Sun | The Province
> Vancouver, BC, Canada
>
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Received on Fri Mar 03 2006 - 23:40:55 GMT