Robin Schwab wrote:
The earliest photograph dates from 1826. The new 150
year rule means
that works are protected back to 1858. This means you'd only keep this
couple of photographs from 1826-1858 for anonymous works.
Note that there is a difference between a work published anonymously, and a work
whos author is unknown. Anonymous works are not problematic if the date of
publication is known: copyright generally ends 70 years later. If the author is
unknown, however, 100 yeas is too short a period. Again: you can't assume the
creator did not live longer than 30 years after creating the work. That's simply
not safe to assume.
This is true no matter where you upload it. Should the hires of the creators
decide to sue, you (the uploader and creator of a derivative) got a problem. And
possibly, we do too.
Take the 228 years old newspaper NZZ in
Switzerland. They publish your examples mentioned above (Pokemon t-shirt
simple photographs etc.) as Public Domain. No press license! They
redistribute it in their archive. No one ever sued them or would do this
currently.
They distribute it on its own, claiming you can use it for any purpose? really?
got a link?
A newspaper can use a lot of material in editoral context. That is fair use. To
an image repository, however, this does not apply.
In addition to that, Switzerland has a relatively high threashold of originality
required for a photo to be copyrightable. I don't know whoe they deal with
character copyright, which would also apply in the case of Pokemon.
-- Daniel