The name is still up for debate, but the concept is there. The Rafu Shimpo, my first internship, has moved its offices. In moving, a great deal of purging took place, with many photos, among other things, being thrown out.
Luckily, a friend over at Inland Empirical was able to save some boxes and we plan on scanning and archiving the prints, putting the photos up on a website with the hope that people will be able to identify the subjects and hopefully we will be saving a bit of Japanese American history.
We do have a few lingering concerns that we hope to address before we begin such as who owns the rights to the photos if they were going to be thrown out? Should we be printing out these photos on archival quality paper and, if so, where do we store these photos?
Sounds cool. Probably the people who took the shots still have claim to copyright, but hopefully you’ll be able use the Google Books approach and just take photos down when someone claims copyright and objects to them being posted.
I am fairly certain that the newspaper, and not the photographers, own the rights to the photos. But does that change in any way if they throw away the negatives and prints?
I haven’t been able to track down any useful information about ownership of the photos; no one seems to know anything. I guess instead of being forgotten in a landfill they will be forgotten in a hall closet.
Oh well. It was one of my better ideas anyway.
So…. this is what you up to these days…. 🙂 How’s L.A. ?
Just do it, and sort it out if/when they complain… small papers like that don’t give a crap about little things like this, specially if you are not making any money off it. There is not a copyright stamp on it, is there? play dumb, it worked for me….. Oh, wait, I am naturally dumb, I forgot.
Here’s a twist: It’s a small “community newspaper,” but it’s not a non-profit. As soon as they see any kind of success attached to this project…Who knows?