Quote:
Originally Posted by LaurelRusswurm
Public domain works are available to everyone to do whatever they want, including publishing and selling it. If I publish a book of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, I can put a copyright notice on my physical book. This means that you can't photograph or scan my pages and then publish and sell it yourself. What is copyright is my expression of the book; how I've laid it out, illustrations, like that. What you can do is copy the content; ie the words from my publication, because the words comprising A Christmas Carol are in the public domain.
|
You can certainly put a copyright notice on it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your claim of copyright has any validity. In the EU, you
may gain the protection of a "typographical copyright" for your layout, etc, but only if you can demonstrate a significant degree of innovation and creativity for it. Many countries (eg the US) do not have typographical copyrights at all. The chance of having any copyright protection at all for your theoretical version of "A Christmas Carol" are close to zero, I'm afraid.
Quote:
|
Something that seems to me a huge problem with copyright law the world over is that nothing protects the public domain.
|
Yes it does. People can claim false copyrights, but that doesn't mean that those claims have any validity.
Quote:
|
That said, ordinary people don't make the laws and copyright laws in many places don't allow creators the right to place our own work in the public domain.
|
Can you name one of these "many places"? I am aware of no country in which a simple statement that "this work is in the public domain" is not valid.