On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, David Starner wrote:
On 11/24/05, Gutenberg9443@aol.com <Gutenberg9443@aol.com> wrote:
Stuff you BOUGHT from Dover is okay. Dover, to the best of my knowledge, does nothing that is not out of copyright.
That's not true. Much of Dover's material is original, reprints of material still under copyright, or reworking of public domain material until the copyrighted material is hard to seperate from the public domain (the clip art books are a good example of this; they have a compilation copyright, and I suspect they've done enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases).
Dover is very good about not claiming copyright for most of their books, so I would simply bypass Mr. Starner's blatant "That's not true," for an opportunity to ask them yourself. * As for doing "enough cropping and cleaning on the art to claim a copyright on the pieces in many cases," The U.S. courts ruled that any attempt to accurately depict public domain works remains in the public domain. "The point of the exercise was to reproduce the underlying works with absolute fidelity. Copyright is not available in these circumstances." To read the complete court decision: See Bridgeman Art Library v Corel Corp 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) This decision demonstrated that the efforts of museum curators, etc., to monopolize the reproduction of posters, books, postcards, et. al., of public domain paintings, lithographs, drawings, and two dimensional artwork in general were NOT supported by copyright law, and there was no intellectual input into the content, merely accurate reproduction. As for compilation copyright, one could copyright nearly any collected works project, even if the works were all in the public domain, if one could prove intellectual input into the selection process. However, a complete works cannot be copyrighted, as such, but would need addition in other areas to be copyrightable. I don't know if Mr. Starner resides in the U.S., so I don't know if these are the laws that would apply in his specific instance. Michael