What are the copyright issues related to newspaper digitization?
Newspapers dating from the early decades of the 20th century and earlier are usually exempt from copyright compliance. We provide Digitization Services for materials delivered by our customers, however, maintaining proper copyright compliance is the responsibility of the collection owner, and ultimately, the collection users. If you are considering a newspaper digitization project, we recommend that you do the copyright compliance research prior to embarking on the project. OCLC is not responsible for monitoring copyright compliance for customers. Additionally, there are special sections in newspapers that the publisher doesn’t own the copyright. In these cases, a publisher can list the general sections of their publication for which they do not hold copyright. Based on this list, collection owners can make several decisions: 1) research whether these sections are still under copyright; 2) contact individual creators for approval; 3) redact those sections from the source so that do not
