A personal story about copyright, and why it needs reform.

At Christmas time last year, my book publisher got in touch to just double-check that we had the rights to use the image they were going to use for the cover. This one:

To my horror, I discovered that I had actually hugely misread UK copyright law, and had to scramble over the holiday break to make sure I had the rights to ALL the illustrations in time.

And for the most part, this was easy.

If the artist was alive, I just got in touch. If it was in the RSA's archive and from the 18th or 19th centuries, then I just had to get permission from them for the photographs of those images, and original images were otherwise out of copyright.

But not so for the early 20thC.

This is because copyright for most things in the UK lasts for 70 years after the creator's death.

I was having to track down the creators' heirs. (When I finally did, btw, they always gave permission freely - people are nice).

But the image for the cover was still an issue.

The original, you see, was from the inside cover of a 1935 history of the RSA. And the big, big problem, was that the artist died in 1951.

Which meant that his work had ONE more year until the copyright expired.

And finding his heirs 69 years after his death was proving tricky.

It turned out his daughter had bequeathed all his materials to the V&A. So I rang them. But they didn't know who might have inherited the rights from her, or if she'd even given the rights to them.

So there's me, ordering a copy of her will to try to track down her descendants!

And that is, btw, how you're supposed to do it. The government literally advises subscribing to Ancestry dot com, ordering wills, and contacting various professional organisations that the artist may have been a part of, and so on.

It expects you to become a private investigator

In the end, however, I was in luck. Most of my geneaological research was all for naught.

Because, in reading over the laws one final time, I spotted something. At the time the image was made, copyright was not automatically vested in the creator. (No longer the case btw)

It turned out that, at the time, if a commissioning body had paid a substantive amount for the work, then it was that body that would own the copyright.

So the artist's heirs may not have been the rightsholders anyway. If, that is, the RSA had paid for the work.

And fortunately, lo and behold, the RSA's archivist found evidence that the artist had indeed been paid (and quite a lot, to boot).

Crisis averted.

But I was just lucky here. Really, the whole system stinks.

As a would-be user trying to follow the law, the rigmarole with the cover image revealed major problems with the fact that copyright durations are soooo damn long.

For the benefit of users, creators, and their heirs, the system needs reform. More here: https://www.tenentrepreneurs.org/blog/burnt-by-berne

P.S. I've seen a lot of cases of archives and museums misunderstanding copyright laws and being far, far too restrictive in allowing people to use their material.

Or, in some cases, abusing them. On that note, why is Crown Copyright so long? (120 years!!!) Should all be public!

P.P.S. This is what I mean by abusing copyright laws. This is truly, truly disgraceful behaviour form a public body and should be called out. Frankly, it deserves ministerial intervention: https://twitter.com/marinamaral2/status/1041773572023365633?s=20

P.P.P.S. Comments like this make me think that if we sorted out copyright reform in the UK, we would unleash a true golden age of history documentaries: https://twitter.com/arthistorynews/status/1041797316724903936?s=20

In one final twist of irony: Both paintings and photographs - which cause so much copyright trouble - only became copyright-able in 1862 thanks to lobbying by RSA, the subject of the very book I was trying to find illustrations for: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arts-Minds-Society-Changed-Nation/dp/0691182647/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=