Copyright status of photographs published in 1924 by, and created by, the International Boundary Commission
<p>The International Boundary Commission is a permanent international organization headed by two commissioners: a Canadian and an American. In 1924 it distributed to the public its Report, which contained many photographs that were its own work. The report contains no copyright notice.</p>
<p>The Commission's web site <a href="http://internationalboundarycommission.org/en/privacy.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">contains this paragraph</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Permission to reproduce Commission works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm wondering about usability of these photographs in Wikipedia articles. As nearly as I understand it, Wikipedia's policy says works uploaded to Wikipedia that are not in the public domain must be subject to a license allowing anyone to use them subject only to the condition that authorship and copyright ownership must be acknowledged. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here is Wikipedia's policy on this.</a></p>
<ul>
<li>Are any claims to copyright forfeited by public distribution without a copyright notice?</li>
<li>Would copyrights have expired?</li>
</ul>
<p>PS: <a href="ftp://ftp.nrcan.gc.ca/pub/outgoing/IBC_CFI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here</a> is the 512-page report.</p>
<p><b>Postscript on August 23, 2021:</b> The one current answer does not seem to take into account that the U.S. federal government is not the author, but is merely one of the publishers, of this work (the International Boundary Commission is the author) and also does not explain how Canadian law does or does not apply here. That is why I have started a bounty here.</p>

<p>Wikipedia, at least the English-language edition of Wikipedia, takes the position that what applies to it is US copyright law. Under that law, anything published in 1924 is now in the public domain, and anything published first in the US, or simultaneously in the US and another country with no copyright notice prior to 1978 (the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act) was <strong>never</strong> protected by copyright, but was in the public domain from the date of publication. See <a href="https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain" rel="nofollow noreferrer">&quot;Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States&quot;</a>.</p>
<p>Beyond that, the statement quotes would seem to be, in effect, a license permitting free but non-commercial use. That alone would not normally permit Wikipedia use, except under a claim of fair use. So Wikipedia use would be based on the date of publication, or the absence of a copyright notice, or both.</p>
<p>As a long-term Wikipedia editor, I am confident that the images described would be usable in Wikipedia articles. They might or might not be up-loadable to Wikimedia commons, but I think they would be.</p>
<p>The question of US Federal Government authorship is a distraction, this work would be in the public domain if the US Govt had no role in creating it.</p>

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