Re: Foreign postcards and motion pictures

From: Charles E. Keller <keller[_at_]Ra.MsState.Edu>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 12:45:20 -0500 (CDT)

I am sorry more responses to your query were not posted. Here is my personal experience with this issue of both US and foreign postcards.

Two years ago I had a chance to digitize ~10,000 postcards owned by a collector who was willing to let me make them freely available on the Internet. I had a university site willing to provide the archive space for it. So where is the URL? you ask. It was never created thanks to the massive complexity and paranoia caused by (c) laws. Here are a few of the issues that I can think of, (I am sure the lawyers will correct my errors herein).

1. Many postcards have no date or (c) notice on them.
2. Most very old cards were published in the UK and Germany.
   (Thus no date or (c) notice was needed and the old "manufacturing
   clause" no longer applies to these.)
3. Many postmarks are illegible so this means of "dating" them to pre-1922 is impossible.
4. The "unpublished" correspondence that was written on some is
   (I presume) automatically (c) until the year 2003. (I call this
   one a "submarine (c)" derived from the "submarine patents" that are currently surfacing.<G>)
5. Many postcards have no "provenance" whatsoever.
6. I don't know about the privacy issues involved in posting names, addresses, and words written by the original senders on the back sides of the postcard.
7. The presence of a 3 cent stamp does not help since it was used well past 1921. (I forget the exact range of years that 3 cents were used.)
8. Obtaining permission for thousands of cards from 100s of publishers is the task of for-profit corporations who can recoup their costs.
9. Many say "Printed in Germany" with no publisher or date.
10. Raphael Tuck & Sons, was the UK king and queens publisher so I presume any postcard published by them is (c) in perpetuity???

Anyway, the collection has been dwindling down through piecemeal sales of it to other collectors. Copyright law is doing its job very effectively in insuring that only commercially viable
("best") materials will endure to future generations thus
allowing the "dross" to go to decay.

Charles Keller (non-lawyer)

<keller[_at_]ra.msstate.edu>                              Quote for the Day

Police are _The Thin Blue Line_ that separates the people from anarchy. Received on Fri Apr 25 1997 - 17:51:05 GMT