2008/12/26 WJhonson@aol.com:
IF I take a photograph, or even "digitize" (scan) a print document, I own the copyright to what *I* have done.
Careful here. I'm pretty sure that to successfully assert copyright, you need to have contributed some reasonable degree of *originality*; and then at *best* you have copyright over the additional, original elements that were not in the original work.
If you take a carefully framed and lit photograph, then those aspects are copyrightable. If somebody chopped off everything except the document and copied that, you probably wouldn't have a leg to stand on in most jurisdictions.
Will Johnson