Re: SVRy S Wye photo

Martin, then I hope you don't mind me posting them. I know that the photo of the speeder came to me from someone else besides you and possibly the other S wye photo as well, but that person may have gotten it from you or not which brings up sort of a dilema with old photos.
I bought some SVRy/OLC photos on post cards once from a museum and the museum had marked copyright on the back. I new full well that very old copies of at least some of the photos probably exist in the hands of other collectors. I asked the attendant how they could copyright something like that where there are copies of the same photos out there that are probably just as old as the original image they scanned to make up the post cards. I can see a copyright on the format of having the image on a post card, but it seems like if the original photographer and anyone he may have assigned rights to are long gone it would not be valid to try to copyright the actual image. How does this work in the eyes of the law?
This general question of how copyright works also came to my mind a while back when to my supprise I saw some early logging photos in a copyrighted book, when I assumed I probably had the only set of those photos which came to me from an engineer that worked on that logging line. Obviously there were mutltiple copies out there of the originals which were probably taken not by a proffessional, but by one of the crew with a 122 camera or something similar, with copies going to other crew members.