Book People Archive

Re: copyright of photoreproduced text

Ok, let's put this to the test.  A perfect example of this is the "facsimile of
the First Edition" of Blackstone's Commentaries that I have on my desk.

Open the first page, and it says:

    1979 by the University of Chicago
    All rights Reserved. Published 1979
    Printed in the United States of America

Now, I can see them claiming copyright on the new introduction by Stanley Katz,
but the copyright notice should have specified this, no?

Can I OCR the book and put it on the web? Their blanket copyright statement
would imply that I can't (without their permission), yet the text has been in
the public domain for, oh, say 200 years!

Comments?

Ryan


"C. Perry Willett" wrote:
> 
> Ben Crowell wrote:
> >  Does anybody know the extent to which a photoreproduction
> >  of an uncopyrighted text can be copyrighted?
> 
> Here's a discussion on the same topic from Humanist.
> 
> Perry Willett
> Main Library
> Indiana University
> pwillett@[redacted]
> 
>          Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 08:55:33 +0100
>          From: Nicholas Finke <nfinke1@[redacted]>
>          Subject: Re: 15.160 image copyright: implications for us?
> 
> As someone who used to teach US Copyright law, the decision in Bridgeman
> seems correct and straightforward.  It simply states that there can be no
> copyright where there is no originality.  Since someone who creates a copy
> of a manuscript page for scholarly use is specifically trying not to add
> anything to the original, but merely to reproduce it as faithfully as
> possible, copyright will not apply.