|
My expectation would be that Google would be able to copyright their scan's of the public domain work. In general, if you create a new form of a work, I think you could copyright that form, but not the content. On the other hand, anyone else could go back to the public domain work and scan it for their own work/copy.
Since its the form that would be protected, you could also extract the words from a Google or other edition (type them? OCR?) and create your own edition since the words are not protected -- just there form is.
Of course, this is along the line of wishful thinking. I don't have any idea what the law says. I'm just stating what I think would be right. The bottom line is that you (Google, etcetera) has some cost/time/resources (however minimal) in creating the new form and it seems that they should have ownership of the specific instance of the work, but not of the content of the work.
|