Use of WW2 photos on my personal blog

[caparkinson]

Hi there, apologies if this has been covered before but I did a search and couldn't find what I needed. I am currently writing a novel set during the battle of Berlin and wanted to blog my research as a series of articles. I would love to illustrate the research with photos but didn't want any copyright issues. Are there any collections that you are aware of that are free from copyright for bloggers etc to use? Or sites that allow you to use their collections as long as you reference them correctly. Any help/advice/link greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Geoff Walden]

Copyright can be a very gray issue, and in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what copyright law says, it only matters what a judge decides in a copyright lawsuit.

Having said that, the photos from the U.S. Army Signal Corps collection in the U.S. National Archives (Record Group 111-SC) are considered to be in the public domain. You can Google National Archives, and probably find an explanation of this, along with some of the Signal Corps photos that have been digitized.

Additionally, the Bundesarchiv in Germany donated a large photo collection to Wikipedia, and they consider these photos to be in the public domain. (Read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Federal_Archives, and the links for Wikimedia Commons, particularly this one on reuse - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commo ... _Wikimedia)

While looking this up in Wikimedia, I saw that the National Archives is doing the same - see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commo ... Categorize and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commo ... 754_-_1954 - some of the WW2 pics are in here, but not many (so far).

Best of luck with your project!

[Urmel]

If it's not for profitn then you can link also the Imperial War Museum stuff.

[caparkinson]

Hi guys, thanks so much for this info. That will really help me out. Cheers, Chris.