Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm afraid that the amount of effort you've put into something has no impact on its copyright status. If a work is in the public domain, it's in the public domain, and putting in a lot of work making it look nice won't change that. If you've added something original to your Shakespeare volume, such as an introduction, or footnotes, then those elements and those alone will be protected by copyright, but the actual text of the poems or plays will not be.
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Well, I understand that reasoning, but how is it that print book publishers do claim copyright on books of Shakespeare plays (or whatever else in the public domain), and claiming it on the "entire" book, not just the cover or intro or anything else that is new/original?
Plus, in my cases, the
sources of my book are in the public domain, but I've made texual emendations throughout the work -- correcting spelling errors that were made in those early 16th/17th century editions, etc.
And the same goes for the graphics I've used for illustrations. In the same sense, I've used public domain woodcuts, but each have been modified (size, shape, cropping, colour, adding shadow, etc.) and surely those would similarly now have my own copyright -- indeed, hypothetically, I could paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa and claim it to be a "new" piece of art, of my own copyright (think of Andy Warhol's soup cans, too, or whatever else).
And if graphic design is copyrightable, why not typographic design, i.e. just the overall coding and layout for my book, regardless of whether or not I'd made any changes to the actual text at all?
I'm assuming you're not a lawyer (although perhaps you are, I don't know!)
but I guess these are the things I wonder about.
