I am doing research over WWII and I have noticed that stock image sites want to charge 200USD per image to use them in an educational manner. How do they get the copyright to these images? It makes me afraid that a handful of sites own the rights to most of the historical images and videos now.
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People sell images, often when people die and the families don’t know what to do with them and Getty and other places buy them at auction.
When someone takes a photo, they are automatically granted the copyright of that photo. They can sell the rights to whoever they want.
Copyright takes a long time to expire. In 2020 the work needs to be created in 1924 or older to automatically enter public domain, assuming the creator is long dead. [Cornell University has more info](https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain).
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