I’m going to a Roaring 20’s costume party and I want to print out the front page of a newspaper from the era as part of my costume; e.g. the NY Times page of Lucky Lindy crossing the Atlantic. Would that fall under fair use? I know it’s a pretty minor thing but the person who will print it out for me is pretty anal about violating copyrights (she’s a photographer).
Fair Use is really just a set of guidelines and only a court can definitively decide whether a particular case is fair use. Your usage (making a costume just for fun) may or may not fall under fair use factors… it’s sort of transformative, you’re not making any money off it, you’re unlikely to impact the worth of that article (especially if you buy it from the NY Times archives for $3.95), etc. They’re also extremely unlikely to find out about it to begin with, much less prosecute you. There’s also the chance that an article published in 1920 is already out of copyright to begin with, though I’m not sure for that particular article.
If you want to reasonably okay, just buy it from the NY Times and take it to a local printer instead of your photographer friend.
If you want to be absolutely sure, you have to write the NY Times and seek explicit permission for your use, or ask a lawyer to verify that the article is already out of copyright.
Lindbergh’s flight was in 1927. According to this, if the copyright was renewed 28 years later (in 1955), the copyright will expire in 2022. If it wasn’t, it’s already public domain.
Just to add some more info…
The archives FAQ says that “You may save articles from our Article Archive for personal use. Copying or storing any article for other than personal, noncommercial use requires permission from The New York Times.” This suggests they are OK with you copying it for your personal, noncommercial use.
You can also buy a big-ish print directly from them:
No copyright concerns there since they print (copy) it for you.
Yeah, that’s what I’m not sure about. How do you check the copyright status of a particular article?
In the US anything from 1922 or before is in public domain. You can get some information here
http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/publicdomain/SearchC-R.html
on how to check. But by and large it is quite a pain to check on the status of newspaper articles and I’m never quite sure I’ve done it properly (thoroughly).
You do a search at the Library of Congress.
If the Times was copyrighted at all - and not all newspapers bothered, since they never envisioned any further use for stale news - the paper was copyrighted as a whole. Whether it was renewed 28 years later is even harder to say. Not all renewals appear to be in the LoC’s records.
The convention is that nothing put into print after January 1, 1923 is in the public domain until proven to be. (That date is from a quirk in the last copyright term revision law.) That’s probably the guideline that the OP’s photographer friend follows.
Would I do it? My first instinct was to say no. On second thought, this does fall under personal, noncommercial use.
Let your friend decide. If she won’t do it, find a page from 1920-1922 and use that with no second thoughts.
Personally, I would regard the one-time use in a costume to qualify as personal, noncommercial use.
If your costume doesn’t reference Lindbergh directly, that time period covers some significant events like the institution of Prohibition and women receiving the right to vote.
Get the original on eBay:
That’s not an original. What they are selling is a photographic print of a scan of the original paper (and only the top half of the front page).
If they are selling it commercially and they are a legitimate business, that implies to me that the image itself is probably public domain. The source they list is the National Archives.
You guys rock. The link from the NYT archives was good enough to placate the photographer. Thanks for all the replies!
Will we get to see a picture of the final product? (the whole costume, including aforementioned accessory)