What is copyright?

Copyright protects creative or artistic works including photographs. You should only copy or use a copyrighted work with the copyright owner's permission or if the work is your own copyright, i.e. an original created by you that does not infringe anyone else's copyright.

You should only upload images to The History Album which are your own copyright, or where you have permission (preferably in writing) from the person who took the photograph. Obviously many of your old family photographs could be so old that you could not have taken, them, but if they were taken by a member of your family you should be able to get permission to let you add the photographs to The History Album. If in doubt of copyright please do not use them on The History Album.

When do pictures go out of copyright?

Bear in mind that copyright lasts for seventy years from the death of the creator of a copyright work, so in the year 2008 you could only use an original photograph without permission if the person who took it died in 1937 or before. In such a case, the original physical image is out of copyright. However, just because an image shows a scene that is from 100 years before the death of the person who took the original picture, does not mean it is out of copyright. You need to check further. If someone has an out of copyright original image, but copies it today, then they will have copyright in the copy or scan they have made for seventy years from when they die. In effect, the scans of any images put on The History Album by you will be your copyright, regardless how old the original is, as long as the original image you copied or scanned was your copyright, or legitimately out of copyright. We therefore ask users to respect the copyright of other contributors to the site, just as they would want their own copyright respected.

This is a very quick guide to the general rules of copyright. It is a lot more complicated than this, but simply put, if you created a picture and it is not a picture of someone else's work (e.g. from a magazine or book), then you will be OK. If you want to research copyright in more detail, a good place to start is:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/whatis/whatis-copy.htm