Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Ushiwaka1189

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This deletion discussion is now closed. Please do not make any edits to this archive. You can read the deletion policy or ask a question at the Village pump. If the circumstances surrounding this file have changed in a notable manner, you may re-nominate this file or ask for it to be undeleted.

Files uploaded by Ushiwaka1189 (talk · contribs)

[edit]

The latest round of uploads by a sock of GMatteotti. As before, these ca. 1940s German photos are claimed to be anoymous and therefore in the public domain in Germany. It's quite doubtful if the photos are actually "anonymous" in a legal sense in Germany, as we don't know when, how and where they were first published, if that publication was uncredited and if the photographer was not publicly known otherwise (as required by German law). All we have is blog and web sources, no contemporary sources of the photo.

But even if the "anonymous" claim were true and the photos were published right away in ca. 1940, they would still have been protected on the URAA date for Germany in 1996, and the US copyright (until the end of 2035) would have been restored. The files should be deleted.

Rosenzweig τ 10:51, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ok for deletion. 79.20.12.95 11:23, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Keep The URAA date would not matter, the Office of Alien Property Custodian confiscated or invalidated all Reich era patents, copyrights, and trademarks in the US. I believe that ended on May 13, 1966. --RAN (talk) 22:40, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No. Not true. As I wrote in others DR already, that only applies to a small number of German works from that period.
Per en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights#Wartime copyrights, “Any copyrights that were "ever owned or administered by the Alien Property Custodian" were not restored if the restored copyright would be held by "a government or an instrumentality thereof".” There is no indication that the copyright of these photographs was held by a government. And per en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights#Germany, “A number of German cases indicate that the copyright in images or graphic works remains with the author, even if the works were produced for official use. All of these German copyrights were extended in period to 70 years pma before the date of restoration, and so the US copyrights have been restored.”
And due to the nature of US copyrights, these photographs most likely weren't even copyrighted in the US at the time, so there was nothing to "confiscate". There was a copyright treaty in force between Germany and the US, but any German author / rights holder would have needed to register a copyright just like their US counterparts. Per [1] (section Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents), “only selected copyrights and trademarks were vested, [but] "all patents of nationals of enemy and enemy-occupied countries" were vested”. Vesting being what this process was called in the WW II era. Hitler's Mein Kampf was among the works which had their copyright vested, along with works by a number of European authors and composers, many of them French or Italian. The claim that the Office of Alien Property Custodian confiscated "Reich period" copyrights in the USA (or rather vested than confiscated) is true for works like Mein Kampf of Friedrich Beilstein's Handbuch der organischen Chemie, but as can be read in the linked article, this certainly does not apply to all German works as implied. So there was no impediment to the URAA restoring this photograph's US copyright in 1996. --Rosenzweig τ 01:00, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If it's so, you can delete them. 95.239.125.208 10:33, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Ok for deletion. 193.207.150.170 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Clindberg: I am pinging Clindberg, who is well read on international copyright law. Rights were restored to named authors (except Hitler), anonymous works had no one to restore them to, and remained exempt from copyright in the USA. --RAN (talk) 01:18, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Where do you get that claim that "Rights were restored to named authors" (only)? None of our URAA pages say so. The country tables at en:Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights even explicitly mention anonymous works several times. And how do you even know that these images are "anonymous"? As I wrote above, "It's quite doubtful if the photos are actually "anonymous" in a legal sense in Germany, as we don't know when, how and where they were first published, if that publication was uncredited and if the photographer was not publicly known otherwise (as required by German law)." --Rosenzweig τ 01:39, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If it's so, you can delete them for copyright violation. 82.60.174.64 11:55, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's just a repetition of what you wrote above. You completely ignored my replies above and did not answer any of the questions I asked. --Rosenzweig τ 21:18, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Accd. to a Spruchkammer (tribunal) decision from 1948 (confirmed in 1965), Hitler's assets (which included his copyrights) were transferred to the state of Bavaria (there was no German government in 1948). de:Mein Kampf#Urheberrecht. But what has that to do with these photographs? --Rosenzweig τ 00:45, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted: procedural close: both files deleted by Túrelio on 18 January referring to this discussion; apparently, Túrelio forgot to close the request. --Gestumblindi (talk) 12:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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