On 11/25/05, Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> wrote:
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.
That's completely non sequitor. It is not true that all of Dover's books are out of copyright; I don't even know that most of their books are, given the number of compilation copyrights and outright new material they have.
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.
Any attempt to _accurately depict_ a public domain work is in the public domain. But creatively using a public domain work to produce a new work does give you a copyright. If you take a public domain work, and you selectively cut out pieces of the picture, you get a new copyright. If you want to argue that simply trimming away the image away from the main subject wouldn't get a new copyright, that's arguable, but certainly not covered by Bridgeman Art Library v Corel.