Quote:
Originally Posted by John F
Could you republish it with no changes, other than having a new copyright page, changing the author name, and claiming it to be an original work? Not a copyright violation, but fraud?
Just curious.
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As far as copyright law is concerned, you can do whatever you want to with it. Anything. Anything at all. Including claiming your own copyright, although that claim would have no validity unless you had made creative changes. Many authors have incorporated passages from public domain works in their own books; that's absolutely fine. There's a whole industry revolving around reusing characters and situations from public domain books - eg writing new "Sherlock Holmes" stories.
Whether making such false claims would fall foul of other laws is an entirely unrelated matter. You would need to look at the laws relating to fraud and see if what you're proposing would constitute fraud. That's not an area I have any knowledge of.