I love paper items and photos, but in a moral sense, I think the copyright question of WW2 photos is pretty different to most modern image libraries when considered in the context of what the original photographer was paid for their photos.
I deal with image copyright almost every day in my work and there's nearly always a clear money trail back to the photographer. That's not often the case with war photos (i.e. 'souvenired', or sold by relatives of the dead photographer).
One thing that tends to be a commercial reality is that there's a relation between the price of a photograph and how difficult it was for the photographer to get the image in question. If you could take the same photo yourself easily, then it's usually cheaper.
I wonder what price/difficulty ratio there would be for a photographer to go to e.g. place themselves inside the Stalingrad pocket. And yet they're not getting any royalties - instead it's us collectors worrying about our (as Akira correctly pointed out, in fact non-existant) copyright from the comfort of our armchairs.
I deal with image copyright almost every day in my work and there's nearly always a clear money trail back to the photographer. That's not often the case with war photos (i.e. 'souvenired', or sold by relatives of the dead photographer).
One thing that tends to be a commercial reality is that there's a relation between the price of a photograph and how difficult it was for the photographer to get the image in question. If you could take the same photo yourself easily, then it's usually cheaper.
I wonder what price/difficulty ratio there would be for a photographer to go to e.g. place themselves inside the Stalingrad pocket. And yet they're not getting any royalties - instead it's us collectors worrying about our (as Akira correctly pointed out, in fact non-existant) copyright from the comfort of our armchairs.
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