Two dates decide whether a work can be sold here, and they are not the same date.
In Switzerland, the European Union and the United Kingdom: copyright expires seventy years after the death of the maker. A work is free if its maker died before 1956.
In the United States: the rule turns on publication, not death. Anything published before 1931 is in the public domain. The date moves forward by one year every January.
These two systems do not line up, and the gap between them is where most reproduction businesses get into trouble.
The trap
Consider a photographer who died in 1954. In Europe, their work entered the public domain on 1 January 2025. A European shop can print it freely. But if the photographs were taken in 1940, they remain under copyright in the United States until 2036 — and roughly half the wall art market is American.
There is a further complication most sellers have never heard of. The Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 restored American copyright to many foreign works that had already fallen into the public domain in the US on technicalities. Works that were free in 1993 became protected again in 1996. A European seller checking only European dates will not see this coming.
Our rule
A work enters the Museartis catalogue only if it satisfies both tests. Free in the United States, and free in Switzerland, the EU and the UK.
We do not sell works with market restrictions. We do not geo-block. If a work cannot be shipped everywhere we ship, it is not in the catalogue.
This costs us motifs. Several artists whose work is now free in Europe remain unavailable to us because of the American date, and some of them would sell well. We leave them out.
The third test
Two further things can be true of a work that is itself out of copyright.
The file may be licensed. A photograph of a public domain painting can carry its own rights, and stock library licences generally do not permit resale on physical products. The painting being free says nothing about the contract attached to the image file. We source only from collections with an explicit public domain release.
The attribution may be uncertain. A work can be free and correctly sourced, and still not reliably by the artist whose name is attached to it. Where an attribution has not been confirmed by the holding collection, we write attributed to — the conventional scholarly formula — rather than claiming an author we cannot evidence.
Why we publish this
Because it is checkable. Every product page names the collection and the inventory number of the original. You can look it up. That is the point of putting it there.
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