[WikiEN-l] copyright on scanned copy?

Fri Nov 17 14:37:51 UTC 2006

Zero wrote:
> I have an actual situation as follows.  Someone has taken
> an old map (long out of copyright), scanned it onto their
> computer, and now claims to hold copyright on the scan.

Big media companies do this all the time.  For example, if you go
to a bookstore and buy a recent printing of Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland, I think you'll find that the publisher has claimed
copyright on *their copy* of Tenniel's illustrations and/or
Carroll's text.  (Dover, at least, is a happy exception.)

> There is no artistic input to the result, and in this
> case the scanner even advertises that the computer
> file is a precise reproduction of the original.

There may be no artistic input, but some will claim that they
deserve protection for all the work they did tracking down the
old map and making the scan.  To be lily-white, it can be argued
that you're supposed to track down an original copy of the old
map yourself, and make your own scan.

(On the other hand, if the computer file truly is a precise
reproduction of the original, you can convince yourself that
using it is fine, since the alleged copyright holder can't prove
you're using their scan.)

This situation gets particularly interesting in the case of
famous art.  Most museums disallow cameras; casual visitors
are not allowed to photograph or otherwise make copies of
the artwork within, even though it's long out of copyright.
If you're a publisher and you want to make a copy for an art
book you're printing, you have to pay the museum a -- sometimes
hefty -- licensing fee.  Having paid this fee, you're not going
to let people freeload on you, so you're going to slap your own
copyright on your art book.  And the museum will back you up on
this: they make money on those licensing fees; in fact part of
their licensed-copy agreement is often (I think) a requirement
that the licensed copies disallow reproduction.

The upshot is that if copies are copyrightable, it can be
effectively impossible to obtain your own free copy of a public
domain work, if the original is inaccessible.

I am not a copyright lawyer and I don't know if the practices
I've described are defensible from a copyright law point of view.
(*I'm* certainly not defending them.)  But I get the impression
that they do happen all the time.  In other words, the claim that
someone "deserves protection for all the work they did (or the
fees they paid) tracking down the old map and making the scan"
is apparently accepted in practice.