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Re: copyright questions



Good morning Ms. Haun,

Copyright guru Peter Hirtle and myself had a discussion about this several months ago as I also deal with correspondence from people who quite frankly, have no heirs to track down.  We agreed that since intellectual property such as copyright is considered part of a person's estate, state laws would apply.  If a person has no heirs, his estate (including copyright) would be administered by "the state" and may become the actual owner.

Unfortunately, we also agreed that trying to track down the person in a state's government that handles intellectual property could really be a nightmare!  My solution (and what we do here) is to use the phrase  "Courtesy of <the creator's name>" which signifies that while you are aware of the copyright holder's identity, it was impossible to track him or her down.

Of course, one doesn't need copyright for a researcher to LOOK at something in an archives so all of this may not be necessary.  Copyright only deals with publishing, not necessarily access.

Hope this helps,

Gregory Pike, C.A.
Digital Manuscript Project
National Library of Medicne
pikeg@mail.nlm.nih.gov 
(301) 435-8213
c/o
History Associates, Inc.
Rockville, MD 20850

>>> jehaun@HOME.COM 08/31/00 05:14PM >>>
Regarding the copyright of unpublished materials after the author's
death, does anyone have any idea what happens when there are no
known heirs? I have  a researcher who is somewhat eager to look
at a correspondence file for a donor who died in the late 1970s.
There are no heirs identified at this point to clarify copyright
permission for our institution. Does anyone know of any precedents
in this sort of situation?

Thank you for any guidance you can share.

Jacqueline Haun
Archivist
The Lawrenceville School
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
(609) 895-2034
jhaun@lawrenceville.org 

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