Book People Archive

copyright of photoreproduced text

Dear Book People:

  Does anybody know the extent to which a photoreproduction 
of an uncopyrighted text can be copyrighted?  I assume that the
work as a whole can be copyrighted, esp. if there is a new intro
or commentary, but is one free to re-reproduce the (copies of) 
the original images?  

  The text involved is a mid-19th century dictionary, and the point of 
the exercise is to electronically re-order the entire text entry-by-entry
(going from the original phonetic to a modern alphabetical order).
Original copies are rare as hen's teeth, so it's easist to work with 
the new printing.  Getting a release would be easier still, but
the publisher is a (foreign) government agency, and it's likely
to be a mondo pain to find somebody willing to sign a form.

  Thanks, 
  Doug Cooper



_________________________________________________
Center for Research in Computational Linguistics, Bangkok
               1425 VP Tower, 21/45 Soi Chawakun
      Rangnam Road, Rajthevi, Bangkok, Thailand 10400
        doug@[redacted] (662) 246-8946  fax (662) 246-8789

[Moderator: The answer may vary depending on what country you're
 in and whether a new typesetting is involved.  (Some countries prevent
 a recent typesetting from being copied for a certain period
 of time, while still allowing a re-setting of the content if that's in
 the public domain.)  We discussed this issue a bit in May (see the thread
 in the archives that month labeled "copyright".)  See also
 http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/okbooks.html
 for some links to various national copyright law information.  - JMO]