Very clear. The question I have is who holds the copyright from articles of that era -- the magazine or the authors? Was the equivalent of first North American serial rights in use then?But for publications originating in the UK or other European countries, different rules apply. Broadly these rules are the author's lifetime + 50 or 70 years mentioned above. The problem this poses with magazines is that you would need to ascertain the dates of death of all the writers, photographers and artists who contributed to each edition in order to find out whether overall the work could be still in copyright. If you consider a young writer (say in his mid twenties) who contributed an article to an edition published in 1900, who then went on to live until he was 90 (so his year of death was 1965), his work would still be in copyright today and could have another 23 or so years to go. Trying to track down the heirs of such people to obtain permission to re-publish the copyright work is a near impossible task.
And does it make a difference between articles by staff writers, which I assume the magazine owns, and by freelancers?