File:Houseboat Days - Ashbery.jpg

Per the dust jacket's left flap: "Painting on front of jacket by R. B. Kitaj, 'Houseboat Days (for John Ashbery)," private collection. London. Jacket design by Mel Williamson."

For countries that do not recognize the rule of the shorter term and define copyright term based the date of the author's death plus a set number of years:

• According to an obit in the New York Times, Williamson died in 1995.)
• According to an obit in the New York Times, Kitaj died in 2007.

No permission is required for the following reasons:

1. First, the photo is a mechanical scan/photocopy of the original cover and does not qualify for independent copyright protection.
2. Second, the dust jacket was first published prior to 1978 without a valid copyright notice—it was published with a defective notice not conforming to legal requirements.

Houseboat Days was first published in 1977. The hardcover book itself carried a copyright notice, and its contents remain copyrighted. However, the first-edition dust jacket did not carry a separate and valid copyright notice. According to The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices: Chapter 2200, § 2207.1(C) at p. 15:

"A notice of copyright on the dust jacket of a book is not an acceptable notice for the book, because the dust jacket is not permanently attached to the book. Likewise, a notice appearing in a book is not an acceptable notice for the dust jacket or any material appearing on that dust jacket, even if the book refers to the jacket or material appearing on the jacket."

Keep in mind that the pre-1989 requirements for copyright notice were highly formalistic and, other than a few enumerated exceptions, required these three elements:

1. "The symbol © or the word 'Copyright' or the abbreviation 'Copr.' or an acceptable variant such as "(c)";
2. "The year of first publication for the work"; and
3. "The name of the copyright owner, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner."

If just one of these elements is omitted, the work is deemed to have been published without notice and is not eligible for copyright protection.

I (the uploader) examined a copy of the book's first edition dust jacket at the Oakland Public Library. There are credits for the book's author, John Ashbery; the publisher, Viking Press; the jacket designer, Mel Williamson; the painter of the cover artwork, R. B. Kitaj; and finally, the photographer for the author portrait on the back flap, Thomas Victor. All of these notices omit the year.

The credit that comes closest to a valid copyright notice is the credit to Victor, which at least includes the copyright symbol: "© Thomas Victor". Nevertheless, the notice is fatally defective because it omits the year. If that copyright notice had included the year, then it would have protected the entire dust jacket, not just the photograph. According to The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices: Chapter 2200, § 2207.2 at pp. 16–17:

"If a collective work was publicly distributed with a notice for the collective work as a whole—but without a separate notice for the contributions to that work—the notice covers the contributions, even if the copyright owner named in the notice is not the copyright owner of those contributions (exception for advertisements inserted on behalf of persons other than the owner of the collective work)."