Tangled webs of ownership

I'm starting to think about a possible social art residency in an archive. One of the complicated bits to deal with is the ownership and copyright of media and other materials.

Here's an example from my own shoebox archive. It's from the North Bromsgrove High School 1983 production of "The Importance of Being Earnest." I'm pictured seated towards the middle (with hair, no beard and thirty-five years younger).

The copyright of this picture probably belongs to one of the local newspapers. I don't have a record of which one this came from, but at that time there was The Messenger and The Advertiser. The photographer isn't credited either, but maybe in the original clipping. So that's one thing. I probably shouldn't really share this picture without some licencing fee. If one were doing this at scale with a large number of such photographs then there'd need to be a standard process and budget for it.

With that out of the way, the question arises of the permission of each of the subjects for this image to be re-used and perhaps shared. Different practices have grown up on social media but mostly people err on the liberal side, share something and wait for someone to complain. But is this the best we can do? It doesn't feel like the way that you should behave when working with an archive and dealing with the relationship with an institution rather than an old school pal you used to know.

And finally there's the question of dealing with incorrect information. In the copy below the photograph, it looks as though some text has been lost prior to publication. So it says "Alan Stephen Wearing" but it should refer to Alan Poole and Stephen Wearing and the poor girl in between them whose name was Nicki something, but that's depending on the knowledge of one of the people in the photo (me). On Facebook, possibly the person would pop up and identify themselves, but we don't want to always be working on Facebook.

So, plenty of meaty questions from just one faded piece of newsprint.