East Berlin

[Sally]

I have a few photos of East Berlin in the 1960s. Out of curiousity, I searched on Alamy for “East Berlin 1960s”. Some fascinating stuff, but on the second and third row are three copies of exactly the same image, all by different contributors, though two of them differ only in details of the name (ie Everett Collection Historical and Everet Collection Inc). Seems a bit strange and just wondering how this could happen.

 

 

[wiskerke]

WEST BERLIN, 1961. The checkpoint on the border of the American sector of West Berlin, West Germany. Photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran, 1961.

 

That's a coincidence, Fstoppers had an article about this photographer 3 weeks ago. Here.

With a link to his Obituary. Which tells us he died November 18 in 2000. So his copyright would be very much alive.

He worked as a photojournalist for the weekly US News & World Report, which has donated it's archive to the Library of Congress.

Because these images were made while he was employed by US News & World Report, the copyright belongs to the employer.

And now it rests with the Library of Congress. Here it is.

If you click on the Rights and Access button, you'll see this warning: Rights assessment is your responsibility.

Because it's not always clear what the actual conditions re the copyright of images have been at the time of the donation.

That warning is quite recent. Before it would only read: Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.

Now we know that can not always be trusted. (But she lost.)

 

Why it's appearing twice from the same contributor? No idea. I only see one image, and it's not by Everett Collection. I do see those in a Google Image search, but cannot access them. Probably a regional restriction.

I have had doubles as well: one as Alamy News and one as regular stock. And once because I had forgotten that I had included one image the day before also.

 

wim

[Sally]

I can understand a collection agency inadvertently putting it up twice under different names. Who knows, maybe it’s a strategy to get around the algorithm that prevents one account’s images from appearing close together. But what you are saying is that perhaps both this collection agency and the other individual who has submitted it have all taken it from the Library of Congress webpage. So we end up with copies of the identical image. In theory (assuming an image doesn’t any longer have copyright, and it’s legitimate to do this) it could mean a whole page filled with the same image submitted by umpteen people.