This message is directing a question at colleagues who work for newspaper companies, or who deal with press cuttings on a large scale, and may have been asked this. I have a quantity of cuttings from the 1920s to 1950s and would like to reproduce the text in typescript (not scanned) on an archives website that I run. They come from a very wide spread of national and area newspapers. Although there are photographs in some, I know that these would be usually too poor quality for me to use, so I'm only asking here about the text, and specifically about presenting it in typescript on a website. What are the rules for this?

I've always assumed that there were specific rules for newspapers, and I've so far simply contacted a few of the papers' offices and asked if they had objections. Some said 'go ahead', some said 'just credit us' and some said they'd have to ask someone and ring me back, which of course they never did. Therefore I've not done a great deal about it yet.

I have Tim's book and Post&Foster - because they do not highlight newspapers as such, does this mean that I simply apply the main rules of literary works, where in many cases in newspapers of the 1920s to 1950s authorship of short topical columns would be impossible to trace? Do the great companies have some everlasting copyright (as I am told some film distributors have, though I can't believe it), or special terms for their composite publications?

If I just put them on the website, quoting the named newspaper as source, the search engines would easily find out, so I want to get it right first time.