File:SPAD A2.jpg

English: French Photograph taken 109 years ago during First World War of service aircraft. At this time unofficial photography of ships, aircraft, tanks, marching troops etc. was very strictly forbidden, and an assumption can be made that any such photography was either official (and typically government copyright can be considered to have expired by a fair margin after 109 years) or unofficial, in which case it was originally taken quite illegally, and cannot be said to have been ever under a "copyright" law at all (has one copyright over an illegally acquired image??)

In fact an image this old (109 years) - even if none of the above were relevant, can be reasonably assumed to be out of copyright anyway. This particular image has appeared in several published works, going back at least 50 years. None of these previous publications give any clue as to original provenance of the image.

The oldest previous publication of the image I can find is:

Cheesman, E.F. (ed.) Fighter Aircraft of the 1914-1918 War, Letchword (UK), Harleyford Publications, 1960.

In this source, while a general acknowledgement for photographs is given, there is no specific clue as to the provenance or "ownership" of this (or any other) particular image.

Please, could the important and necessary job of cleaning non-free images from Wiki be entrusted in future to humans with sufficient historical (and common) sense to distinguish between the obviously non-copyright and images that might be copyright???

As originally stated - original provenance unknown - taken in 1915 or 1916. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2010 (UTC)