Re: Railroad photo negatives for sale on that auction site

I've researched the laws regarding copyright on photos. Even owning a negative may not give you permission to use as you see fit. If the original owner is still alive, or has an estate or trust set up for his photo collection, or his collection was donated to an organization, you will need to insure that either the negative was sold to you with all rights to its use, or get permission to use the original photo or negative. If the original photographer is unknown, and their original photo or negative you purchased is not in a private collection, you have a lot more leeway in how to use it.
Most organizations that have collections of photos have a process used to obtain permission for a one time use in either a book or presentation. This usually involves purchasing limited rights to the photo's use.
When I was writing my book on the Pennsylvania sand mining company and its railroad, the vast majority of photos were owned by the descendants of the employees and all gladly gave me permission to the rights to their photo. There were two additional photos that I found that I wanted to use. One was owned by the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. The other was owned by a historical society. Both required me to fill out a form and pay a modest fee ($15-20) for the use of the photos in the book.
I'm currently researching for another book and am finding that most of the photos will require an outlay of about $25-$30 each for the rights to use in a publication. Since I'm planning on using approximately 100 historical photos, this is not going to be a cheap book to produce, but if sales are good I'll recoup my investment.
The only caveat to obtaining photos is if the product is for educational purposes (with no profit motive) you may not need to obtain expressed permission to use photos you obtained.
All this is well worth a read...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/11/2018 05:02PM by Dave Peterson.