On 11/17/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
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.)
Under UK law they could claim copyright on the typesetting for 20
years. I don't know what the law in the US is about this though.
(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.
In the museums will not back you up if you take it to court. The last
thing they want is a Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp type case
taken taken to a higher level which would remove any remaining grey
area.
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.
that would depend on the ethical system you are opperating under.
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.
Not really. What is accepted is that you are free to try and claim
copyright on PD material.
--
geni