I was just searching for a good example of that Olan Mills standard blue background and came across their copyright policy. I know this has come up before but I don't remember if it was sorted or not. They seem to grant a routine copyright release for portraits that are more than two years old or for services that they do not provide. I dunno if they do flood restoration ;D but I think that the majority of the stuff we do is more than two years old.
Here is the page with the information if you're interested http://www.olanmills.com/ecommerce/copyright.asp (http://www.olanmills.com/ecommerce/copyright.asp)
That's a great find MJ. While OPR has never been challenged based on copyright, we still have done our "homework", in the event someone was to challenge us. I have spoken to professional photographers who have done portraiture, etc. and not one of them had a problem with what we were doing. Many said that they only keep their images for so many years. With the digital age, it's easier to keep images for a longer period of time now, but not so in the past.
Here is a link to Photo Restoration Ethics. We can thank our web man, John Matthews, for this great find.
Chris
http://www.digitalcustom.com/howto/restorationguidelines.asp
Christine, that is an interesting link to the DigitalCustom site, thanks for sharing!
Hannie