From an ethical perspective I often think credit in these cases is more important than licensing, at least for older stuff. If it's a photo from the 1930s, I honestly don't care if some great-grandnephew technically owns the copyright, but it would be nice to have an accurate caption. The licensing issue gets bigger in my mind the more recent the photos get.
I agree. I think that (mis)attribution is a much more fundamental crime than unauthorized reproduction. It's essentially fraud to pass these off as their own works, or with incorrect captions.
When you see images on Google Image search you get an attribution - that seems the only difference legally between displaying the results of a db query for @HistoryPics twitter posts and displaying the results of a db query for "historic images" (say) on a search engines image search. Sure, the former has been more curated than the latter but having robots do your bidding doesn't appear in TRIPs agreements AFAIR.
There are a lot of opinions about the legitimacy of modern copyright laws, but almost everyone agrees that people deserve credit for their work as long as it is appreciated, so focusing on the latter addresses a more universal issue.
