Newspapers

Utilizing digitized historic newspapers can provide important context and candid insights into research subjects. The advent of digital newspaper collections over the last twenty years has made a massive amount of material publicly accessible but not necessarily available to use.

In addition to everything before 1930 being public domain, if a newspaper never filed a copyright claim between _1930_ through 1977 or never renewed a copyright from _1930_ to 1963, the item is no longer copyright protected.

While identifying the copyright status of newspapers was incredibly difficult, digitization has made this process more manageable and efficient than ever. The method I will detail below is taken from the best practices of Hoosier State Chronicles that they use to select various Indiana State newspapers for digitization. That said, this method isn’t perfect but it will give you a better understanding of the copyright status of the material and demonstrate due diligence on your part.

How to Check Newspaper Copyright

Woman looking into the camera while holding a newspaper with a photo of herself — Murder suspect Peggy Paulos in custody with a scrapbook of her recent newspaper clippings, Port Orchard, Washington, November 10, 1935, under public domain due to The Seattle Star's initial lack of copyright.

Let’s use the above image from The Seattle Star as a test. The photograph is from 1935, too late to be automatically in the public domain.

First, we need to find when the paper was founded. You’ll find many newspapers have Wikipedia pages but you can also access this information through your Newspapers.com or NewsBank accounts at the University of Idaho. Using these resources, we find that the Star was founded early in the year of 1899, so that is likely where we will find the copyright, if there was one registered.

Next, let’s search the Internet Archive’s Catalog of Copyright Entries for the year 1899 and find four different books spanning each quarter of 1899. Now open the item pages for each quarter and use the “Search Inside” function with the paper’s name .

Taking another minute to check the other three books this year, with no account for The Seattle Star, we can determine that the paper never registered a copyright and the paper is public domain.

If we did find the paper in these books, we can then check to see if this copyright has been renewed. Any item that was published before January 1, 1978 needed to renew their copyright 28 years later (with a five year buffer period) to keep it from becoming public domain.For this hypothetical, we would look again at the year 1927, 28 years after the initial registration, and repeat the search process on the Internet Archive. If you don’t find it within the five year span, the paper is in public domain.

The Catalog of Copyright Entries spans 1891-1977. If you need to identify the copyright of a later paper, you can work through the same process on the Library of Congress’ Copyright Public Records System which covers 1978 to the present. If you’d like to learn more, you can read this document from the United States Copyright Office.

Black and white photo of man in glasses, suit and bowtie — University of Washington basketball coach Hec Edmundson in 1945, in the public domain because it was published in the United States without a copyright notice.

Note: These same rules apply to books and magazines but these generally have copyright notices printed in their opening contents, making their status more transparent. That said, there are some types of books and magazines that will not have this material, such as trade magazines, brochures and yearbooks, like this photo of Moscow, Idaho native and famous basketball coach “Hec” Edmundson from the University of Washington’s Tyee yearbook.

Getting Started Fair Use, etc.