Image copyright

[_CaliforniaKid]

Is it possible to copyright scans or photos of pre-20th-century documents? I am aware that Egypt was talking at one point about copyrighting all its antiquities. Could the LDS Church copyright its photographs of the Book of Abraham papyri? The reason I ask is that some of the fragments are not available as images online, and others are only available as blurry images on Wikipedia. So I've been thinking about scanning the images from Gee/Rhodes/Larson and putting them online for all to see. Could somebody with the requisite knowledge weigh in on whether or not that's legal for me to do?

[_truth dancer]

Is it possible to copyright scans or photos of pre-20th-century documents? I am aware that Egypt was talking at one point about copyrighting all its antiquities. Could the LDS Church copyright its photographs of the Book of Abraham papyri? The reason I ask is that some of the fragments are not available as images online, and others are only available as blurry images on Wikipedia. So I've been thinking about scanning the images from Gee/Rhodes/Larson and putting them online for all to see. Could somebody with the requisite knowledge weigh in on whether or not that's legal for me to do?

I'm thinking no, they are not copyrighted because if If I recall correctly, Paul Osborne has several scanned photos on his site. Have you visited his site?

Since Larson has them in his book wouldn't that mean they are NOT copyrighted?

Nice idea CK!

~dancer~

[_Mahonri]

Old photos and writings are all in the public domain. You can't copyright work that is not 'original' or part of a separate compilation. Even if part of a compilation if it is in the public domain your book copyright does not protect the image, just its use in your book.

Copyright protects tangible intellectual expression, not ideas. Get a great idea, tell someone and if they run with it they can copyright the tangible expression themselves. The photo, painting, article or book. You have no recourse as ideas are not protected.

Absent specific laws protecting antiquities of some sort from other countries anything that is basically before (approx) 1925 that was not formally registered with the US Copyright office has no protection.

You can't copyright old lists, etc, as there is nothing creative in them. You can make a compilation but the information is not copyrighted. Anyone can get the old lists anc copy and publish all they want.

Try this link, http://www.pacaoffice.org/resources/commandments.html and it will give you some information on copyright of photos.

Even copyrighted images are subjec to specific exceptions such as fair use.

A big problem is many who use the Internet think anything posted is fair game. They repost and believe it is OK. This can get your internet provider shut down and in an extreme case, a visit from the Feds and prosecution, prison time and fines up to $150,000. Has to be pretty egregious to merit that but just try ripping off Disney stuff and you get in that realm fast. Rip off mine and the FBI will laugh me out of the office.

The big club the LDS Church has if you post scans without permission is that they have lawyers who will sue even knowing they are in the wrong. You end up paying legal fees and they later drop everything after you are broke.

Gerald and Sandra tanner could have easily avoided a lot of trouble by posting some pages from the LDS Bishops handbook and done a critique of it. This would most likely have been found to be fair use in court. But, they would have had to spend the money to defend themselves against the Church Attornies, some of the dirtiest people on the earth.

[_Sethbag]

Whether they could have gotten away with fair use of the CHI depends on whether the court was willing to acknowledge the CHI as an unpublished work. There is generally no fair use right to use unpublished works, with some exceptions I read about for things like letters and diaries that historians and biographers were pushing for. I don't know the precise legal definition of unpublished, but I believe that printing copies solely for internal use does not constitute being published for the purposes of copyright.