ZooplanktonblameOver t1_j5tuvv5 wrote on January 25, 2023 at 3:11 PM

Reply to comment by camwow13 in A firefighter's 1943 photos of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising have been found by Geek-Haven888

I work in digitization at a major institution, specifically on film scanning (among other things). The position of literally everyone who works in this area (including curators especially) is that we should make everything freely available online. Like you say, data doesn't exist unless it's accessible. We feel great pride in making things freely available to the world.

The reason why in every case where we can't make something public is the copyright holder. Polish copyright law on photographs is similar to the US and elsewhere - retroactively applied to 70 years after the photographer's death (the copyright law previously would have put these in the public domain already, but the new law retroactively put these back in copyright).

The institution may own the negatives, but not the copyright - this is standard. So any use requires permission from the copyright holder. Many copyright holders (which often is the estate of the photographer who is no longer alive) are happy to have the images be digitized and available for the public to see, but others emphatically are not for a variety of reasons.

I have no particular knowledge of the situation here. It could very well be that it's the museum itself being stingy and wanting people to come see them in person. But it's not like institutions digitize things for you to see online because they don't want you to come in person. The number of people who are going to go to this museum specifically to see these images is extremely small - mainly niche researchers and historians. So I'm just speculating that it's likely or at least very possible the copyright holder (the son of the photographer it sounds like) is enforcing restrictions on it, because that is extremely common.

camwow13 t1_j5u0vtq wrote on January 25, 2023 at 3:50 PM

That's super cool! I've digitized film as a hobby and for friends/family/small businesses, but not on that scale. I'm sure you love seeing all that old stuff come back to life in modern accessible formats too!

I (wrongly) assumed Poland wouldn't have as hardcore copyright laws as the US does, but yup, that's the case. That definitely makes sense though. You have to stay above board on who holds the rights even if it seems a little ridiculous at times.

It is extremely niche to researchers and historians. I know no museum is holding out with the hope that someone is going to come specifically for some random scanned images. People, even experts in the field, really don't care enough most of the time. Most archivists definitely would prefer to just throw it out (in an organized fashion of course haha) and let bygones be bygones.

Still, I've seen some places stay pretty overzealous on gatekeeping their archives. Random story, I worked for a university and their library had an enormously convoluted process to access their old, university specific, and mostly public domain photo archive. The people managing it are all in their 60s and 70s and would not budge that the super niche 120 year old photos MUST be protected. I worked in marketing and figured out which librarian to contact to have the lists of photo ID's sent over to me in high res when we needed some archival content. The rest of my coworkers just went to the index site, downloaded the low res preview with the watermark, and edited or cropped the watermark out. I couldn't convince them to just take the time to email the right person and get it in full quality, haha.

LogicalConstant t1_j5z5ss8 wrote on January 26, 2023 at 4:09 PM

Copyright laws need a massive overhaul. Patents are arguably more important to society and they only last 20 years. 70 years after the death of the author is ridiculous. If you can't make a profit off of your photographs after 20 years, you have a problem that can't be addressed through copyright law. The whole purpose of protecting copyright holders and patent holders is to benefit SOCIETY by encouraging the production of new ideas and works. It doesn't benefit society when a man in 2023 can stop the world from publishing photographs taken in 1943 by his father who died in 1993. That only benefits the photographer's son, not society.