On 11/17/06, Steve Summit scs@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.