Can I publish a book with photos of my old baseball cards? Are there copyright issues?

The book would be a coffee table-style book with the cards as the photos and brief descriptions of the players on them.

Simple answer: beware, republication of copyrighted works could be an infringement, resulting in damages, injunction, seizure of the books, and possible criminal penalties.

Complicated answer: copyright laws have changed over the years and the copyright duration for your cards may vary. Some prior to 1923 may have no copyright at all. Others would have to have been published with copyright notice and/or registration (up until the 1970s), and after 1979 everything is automatically copyrighted for 120 years from date of first publication (or 70 years after death of the author, in this case the photographer, if s/he is an individual and not a corporation).

So, in summary, you (or your publisher) will need to know when each card was published in the USA, who the author is, whether it had copyright notice or registration (prior to statutory cutoff dates), etc.

You or your publisher will own the copryight to the "collective" work, but not the copyright of the underlying works.

Copyright can be transferred or portions of it licensed, so you may also run into another publisher who already has the "exclusive" rights to publish, although it's not the registered owner of the copyright.

Note also that the "facts" printed with each card are not protected by copyright, although their selection and arrangement might be. So you can freely transcribe "facts" to your own use, but you can' t simply make a photocopy of the facts on the card without the same analysis of who created the card, when it was published, etc.

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