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Originally Posted by HarryT
Only if you add your own material to it. Eg, by writing an introduction, or adding footnotes. The copyright would then only apply to the material that you'd added. You cannot claim a copyright on a direct copy of a public domain text. (Well you could, but it would have no validity).
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It does not have validity, but Google Books still restricts access to such books, and it doesn't have the resources to check if it shouldn't, which means people selling the book successfully disposed of the competition in this case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L
Frankly, this is rubbish. All it's saying is that the likes of Google and Amazon have decided to remove certain works form their PD collections - probably out of caution.
There's absolutely no suggestion that converting a book to PDF, adding a copyright notice, or obtaining an ISBN for it would confer any rights on the person doing it. The only way to obtain a copyright is to create a work, either by writing, painting, photographing, adapting, translating, etc.
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Yes, it would turn out they don't have rights to those works, but each case would have to be researched and judged to determine that. Currently, the companies claiming to have copyright on such books are making money, and oerating as if they really had the copyright. I'm not sure if there's any mechanism that will operate to call them on it, and thousands of public domain books are definitely unavailable from Google solely as a result of this business process.