commerce public-domain publishing
What is the copyright status of a journal article written more than 70 years ago?
<p>I read (mostly on Wikipedia), that copyright to a written work expires 70 years after the author's death, or 95 years after the publication by a corporation.</p>
<p>Having said that, the status of <em>journal articles</em> (scientific or other), that includes pictures and photographs, is still unclear to me. I'll take a very simple example to illustrate this.</p>
<p><a href="http://lakdiva.org/sakwala/sakwala.html" rel="noreferrer">Here</a> you can find an old journal article from 1901, written by one person, but published in a journal. It contains pictures and photographs made in that time. Is the entire article, including these media, also entirely in public domain (i.e., I could just take the whole thing as it is and publish it as a book for commercial purposes)?</p>

<h2>The article is public domain. The pictures aren’t</h2>
<p>If this was first published in the British Empire (as it then was), then The UK is the place of first publication. What follows is its status under UK law, other jurisdictions may have different results.</p>
<p>The original article is public domain because <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Charles_Purvis_Bell" rel="noreferrer">H. C. P. Bell</a> died in 1937 meaning copyright on <em>everything</em> he wrote expired 31 December 2007.  If he’d lived until 1951 or later it would still be under copyright (in 2021).</p>
<p>However, this isn’t the original article because:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Text on this page extracted from an original copy of Annual Report.</p>
<p>The photographs were taken when I visited the site in 1991, and again in November 1995.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The bits that this unknown author added, including the photographs, are their copyright. Since they were clearly alive in 1995 (due to the well known pirate aphorism “dead men take no photos”) the copyright in those is still current.</p>
