According to the Czech Copyright Act (Law No. 121/2000), this work is in the public domain, because the author of the work is unknown and it was published more than 70 years ago (Art. 27, Section 3).
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/PDMCreative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0falsefalse
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it meets three requirements:
it was first published outside the United States (and not published in the U.S. within 30 days),
it was first published before 1 March 1989 without copyright notice or before 1964 without copyright renewal or before the source country established copyright relations with the United States,
it was in the public domain in its home country on the URAA date (January 1, 1996 for most countries).
For background information, see the explanations on Non-U.S. copyrights. Note: This tag should not be used for sound recordings.
URAA rationale: Work was published in 1940, though taken before subject's death in 1895. At the time the photograph was taken jurisdiction lay within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austrian copyright expired 50 years from creation, and at the creation of Czeckoslovakia in 1918, the new country "preserved the Austrian legal system", not developing a separate copyright law until 1926.[1] Act #218/1926 § 39 provided that anonymous/pseudonymous works were protected for 50 years after publication, but under § 13 granted protected author's rights to the first publisher of an anonymous/pseudonymous work.[2] Copyright law was revised (Act No. 115/1953) in 1953 and repealed all provisions of the 1926 law (§ 112); confirming copyright of fifty years (§ 68) for anonymous works, again granting protected author's rights to the first publisher of an anonymous/pseudonymous work (§ 11).[3] These same provisions (§ 8 author's rights to first publisher; § 33 term of 50 years) were extended by a revision (Act No. 35/1965) which was enacted in 1965 and did not expire until 2000.[4] Thus at the time of the URAA effective date of 1 January 1996, the term of protection was 50 years from publication and had expired in 1990 (1940+50)
Captions
Osvald Vídrman (Wiedermann) (1832-1895) Czech educator in Austria-Hungary