My uncle bought some photos of a famous baseball player who has long since past away (baby pictures, baseball related pictures) at a state auction this past weekend. He plans to take them to be appraised and then to resell them and wants to know whether the copyright belongs to him since he paid for them. He doesn't want others to use the pictures for their own gain, I guess, while they're in his possession, or to put them up on the Internet. Thanks!

All Answers To Questions

If he bought the pictures, he has the right to resell the pictures -- that's the implied license that comes with the ownership of the physical pictures. Copyright laws would come into play if he tried to make duplicates of the pictures...

If the pictures are more than 75 years old there is a good chance they are in the public domain. Is the player Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth or other truly legendary player? If so, there's a chance the copyright holder has renewed the copyright. However, your uncle is perfectly able to sell these exact prints (if he makes copies he might infringe the copyright) just as he was able to purchase them. Once out of his possession, the new owner will have to take care of copyright issues.

you got the name of the guy who sold em to you then you got a case if worst comes to worst

He does not automatically, by virtue of his purchase, have any intellectual property rights relating to the pictures. What he has is the right to possess (and resell) the specific copy of the picture that he bought. Without ownership of the intellectual property rights, such as the copyright, he could not put them on the internet, he could not make copies, and he could not use them in advertising, other than in an advertisement for the sale of the copy of the picture itself. If the pictures are extremely old, he could try to check back to see if the rights to the pictures have expired. But that's difficult, and involves tracing the pictures back to their source... and that source may have sold or assigned those rights to someone else...