Talk:British Rail Double Arrow

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Copyright status

I'm starting the discussion here as there are various versions of the logo across Wikimedia, including notably the base version, File:British Rail - colour reversed logo.svg. They all seem to be tagged as though they were originally Crown copyright and are now public domain by effluxion of time (50 years). However, this is based on a misunderstanding as to the original ownership.

The logo was created in 1965, when the legal entity behind British Rail was the British Railways Board. Although this was a "nationalised" railway, the Board was not part of the government: by section 30 of the Transport Act 1962, it was provided that "neither any of the Boards [ie BRB] ... are to be regarded as the servant or agent of the Crown, or as enjoying any status, immunity or privilege of the Crown". At the time, by section 39 of the Copyright Act 1956, Crown copyright applied to works "made by or under the direction or control of Her Majesty or a Government department", which BRB was not (the redefinition of Crown copyright in section 163 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 brought it even more tightly, though it is by that point irrelevant).

By way of a slight aside, it would seem that the copyright which originally vested in BRB in 1965 will almost certainly have been transferred, post-privatisation, by statutory scheme to the Department for Transport following the almost-abolition of BRB and BRB (R), but this just means the Crown owns that copyright, not that it becomes Crown copyright, because it was never "made by Her Majesty or by an officer or servant of the Crown in the course of his duties".

Following the National Archives non-Crown copyright flowchart, if you take the view that the author is known, the copyright will run for 70 years from their death, and if not, then 70 years from first publication - so either way it is firmly still within copyright.

I wanted to leave this here for a little while to see if anyone has any views, as this is complicated stuff - otherwise we will have to look to remedy the situation with the files on Wikimedia. ninety:one 20:47, 5 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Ninetyone: I have no view in particular on the history of this particular logo and I dare say you may be right about the copyright situation. One thing I would note though, is that under US law, this logo almost certainly falls below the "threshold of originality" under which it would be eligible for copyright protection. See c:Commons:Threshold of originality for more detail on this. Basically, because it's just five lines arranged in a grid pattern, it's not deemed an original creative work. Under UK law, which (as detailed on the page I mention) is much stricter in this regard, it probably would be regarded as under copyright. See File:EDGE magazine (logo).svg, for example, a logo which would be public domain in the US but has been explicitly ruled as copyrighted in the UK. So according to the rules of the various projects, Wikipedia can fully host the logo and display it on its pages without issue, since Wikipedia follows only US law. Whereas Commons, which has a tighter restriction of requiring compliance in both the US and the home country of the work, would not permit it to be hosted. Now separate to that, there might be some issues if an editor based in the UK were to be the one to upload it to Wikipedia, although I think it's kind of unlikely National Rail or anyone else is hotly monitoring for infringement on this to the extent of trying to track down individual editors... Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 20:35, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]