Photographs, even of public domain materials, can be copyrighted, though I doubt a similar photograph would infringe. However, this has not been established for photocopies, scans, etc. As for the WORDS on the pages, in the photographs, etc., those are still in the public domain, and you could legally type/scan them in to create an eBook, probably even if the license says you cannot. This would be similar to the case of someone owning a painting in the public domain, and you take a picture of it. You could either copyright the picture or put it in the public domain. Some people claim all rights to reproduction of certain public domain materials, such as museums, but I don't know if that can be enforced outside of certain contracts with the museums. Perhaps just walking in to the museums is regarded in some places like ye olde "shrikwrap" licenses that are no longer legally enforceable. I am not a lawyer. . .this is NOT a legal opinion or legal advice. IANAL = I am not a lawyer. mh On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Greg Newby wrote:
On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 02:16:43PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 11:20:55AM -0500, N Wolcott wrote:
If you have a a valuable collection, if the scans are high quality tiff's or tiff's and jpegs you might enquire about space on ibiblio where they can be accessed as a collection. Many PG tiff's are just high enought quality to "get the job done", you might want yours to be separated from the dross.
I know of a situation. Let's say that it's hypothetical. Someone got access to some extremely old and rare books, and photographed them. The photos were scanned and distributed on CDROM by a company. The owners of the photos say the scans constitute stolen property, and after years of legal action, stopped the company from distributing the scans. The books in question are up to 500 years old and unlikely to ever come back into print.
What is PG's position? The books themselves are clearly not in copyright; the few remaing copies are heirlooms tucked away in a few select private libraries. PG would not be distributing the scans themselves. If PG could get access to the scans, would it be ethical to use them?
(Are you talking about scans of photos, from CDs? Were there any other value-added processes involved in creating the scans/photos? Are these entire books, or some sort of collection of items, which might have a compilation copyright?)
Please let me know the official answer.
This is an official answer, but doesn't quite meet your needs.
The short answer is that it's hard to deal with hypotheticals, since there are a few issues that could mitigate. The main one is if there's a relevant court case that was decided that could impact our decision. The other is if the books could count as unpublished manuscripts, which get a separate copyright period of modern-day protection, regardless of when they were published (http://gutenberg.org/howto/copyright-howto).
But our basic answer is that IF the source is verifiably public domain in the US, using our clearance procedures, then scans or pictures of the source, as well as OCR, proofreading, markup, and completed eBooks, are also public domain.
This is a position that has been vetted by several lawyers who help PG, but has not yet been tested in court as far as we know. The closest counter-example I can think of is the dead sea scrolls, which (IIRC) did end up with some sort of copyright protection despite their age.
In other words, there *might* be a risk. When we get such requests, we sometimes need to look at the risk of getting sued, as well as our own procedures. We're definitely willing to take risks, but in a thoughtful manner.
Feel free to send me further details, or just upload the request via http://copy.pglaf.org, along with details. -- Greg
Dr. Gregory B. Newby Chief Executive and Director Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation http://gutenberg.net A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541 gbnewby@pglaf.org
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