Template talk:Polishpd
See also the Polish version of this template at pl:Szablon:PD-PRL. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 12:24, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)
Some explanation:
According to the copyright law of Polish People's Republic of July 10, 1952: a photograph is a subject of copyright, if there is a clear copyright notice on the work (Art. 2 §1). There was a similar rule in the previous copyright law of 1926. This rule existed for the works published until 23 May 1994.
According to some court verdicts, general © in a book is enough copyright notice.
The copyright law of 1952 concerned photographs taken by the Polish author, or first published in Poland.
There is a situation possible, when original prints of the photograph had copyright notice, but they were published in some later book without any copyright notice. As a result, somebody who sees them without copyright notice, might not know, that they are copyrighted.
According to the Polish Highest Court verdict (published in OSNC 2003/7-8/110): if there was no copyright notice on later prints, the photograph is still copyrighted, BUT it is the copyright holder to prove, that the person, who used it, had known, that it had been copyrighted. Remember, however, that Court verdicts are not precedent law in Poland, and can only be treated as opinions for future - and note, that this is not a legal law opinion on my side. Pibwl 19:05, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
(In practice it seems, that during the communist period in Poland, most photographers didn't care about copyrights of their photographs - maybe except for artists.)
rename category[edit]
It has been proposed in Wikipedia:Categories for deletion that the category in this template be renamed from Category:Pre-1994 Polish images to Category:Pre-1994 Poland images. If you have objections to this, please raise them soon! --ssd 07:37, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)