> On Aug 19, 2015, at 11:37 PM, Fred Cisin <ci...@xenosoft.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 19 Aug 2015, Paul Koning wrote: >> Reminds me of a guy who sold US military aircraft flight manual scans, with >> his "copyright" notice on every page. Never mind that such things are in >> the public domain by law. > > The ORIGINAL is in the public domain, and he would have no rights to restrict > anybody else from scanning and distributing the original. > HOWEVER, even the flimsiest claims of enhancement could enable a copyright > claim for a "derivative work", and protect copies of HIS scans.
Any sufficiently dishonest lawyer can make claims like that, and some do, but that doesn't make it a valid claim, and ones like that are not. First of all, a derivative work has to have a creative component; plain labor, even if time consuming, is not relevant. Second, derivative work copyright for the new author covers only the changes made by the new author; the part that is taken from the original is covered by the original copyright (if any). > > Project Gutenberg ran into that in their early days. They thought that they > could scan modern printings of public domain literature, and distribute those > as images. But, although the WORDS are public domain, by dint of their > typography, the modern printers have claim to those images. They might pretend this, but they would be wrong. paul