Zero 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.) 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.

On 11/17/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000(a)yahoo.com> wrote: It depends what country you are in and what country they are in. Unless you are in the US or Switzerland the answer is that while it probably is bluff it could be an expensive one to call. If they are not in those two counties they are not refuring to you. -- geni