As we poked around the internet for digital footprints of Broadway High School, we came across a link to classmates.com and found that they promised the full text to Sealth for all but a few of the years the yearbook was published.
This is both a positive and a worrisome thing. On the one hand, classmates.com is a popular site and will likely house these digital treasures for a long time. On the other hand, it is a commercial venture that can control access to the images. So we asked ourselves: can they legally do that?
We do not claim to be legal experts, so what we discuss here should not be construed as legal advice. We read several blog posts like the The Legal Genealogist and attempted to digest federal code on the topic, but we ultimately landed on UW's Copyright Connection that guided us to L.N. Gasaway's chart of when works pass into the public domain. Using this we can see that Sealth through 1922 are in the public domain. We have not yet found a copyright notice on Sealth since then, so it is likely that those through 1946 are also in the public domain.
So classmates.com is likely "in the clear" to house these, and so are other individuals who may wish to disseminate Sealth contents to the greater public.
