Can you change the medium of a public domain work and copyright it?

Question

I recently bought a cd-rom of a work that has become public domain. The creator has taken the public domain work and scanned the pages, creating PDF files. He claims the work is copyrighted and can't be used without his permission. I am wondering is this possible? It's the same work he has just changed the medium.

Answer 1

Yeah, but not the words, only the format, font and text. You can't directly copy it, but you can TRANSFER IT, to say, Word for Windows or RTF, in a plain font.

Typesetting can be copyrighted if it is more than just random letters, unless the letters are new and unique (such as Lettraset Letters).

You can also add material to an PD work or change something about it. "House of the Rising Sun" is a PD musical composition, but Alain Price has a copyright on the new arrangement used by the Animals and gets a 10 or 15% royalty from that arrangement which endures into the year 2050.

Now, this does become a gray area. If the publisher took a PD book and scanned it and turned it not PDF, you can techically do the same thing. What you can't do is directly copy their formatting, fonts and indexing to such a degree that your book gets confused with their book.

What the publisher holds a copyright on is based on the NEW AND UNIQUE WORK they put into the new format. This means you can't clone it, but you can go to another original source book and scan that and market that yourself, provided YOU can show a court YOU did new and unique work in making the original.

But your work better not "resemble" their work more than 60% or you will need a good lawyer to beat that one!

In short, you can't copy their PDF files and distribute them, but if you make your OWN PDF files from another PD book you can't distribute that, but to be on the safe side I'd change fonts, add a new and unique introduction, maybe some original or PD graphics on pages to make your book DRASTICALLY different and unique.

Answer 2

You have good instincts. If he has not altered, transformed, or recast the original into a derivative work, then the answer is no. A derivative work is not just the same work in another file format. The expression must have changed in some way, not just a change to the technical system that causes the expression to be perceptible. His copyright would only extend to the original, creative additions to the text, images, etc., that he added to the public domain works; he would have no right at all in what already lies in the public domain. It sounds like he wants to revive a dead copyright and paste his name over the original authors'.

Here is an important exception, though. He might have no rights in the individual items, but he could have rights in the collection as a whole, if the selection and arrangement of its contents was somehow creative. It is a pretty flimsy copyright protection, because it basically only prohibits someone from reproducing the whole collection or almost all of it; a person can still take the individual pieces without infringing the copyright in the collection.

Answer 3

If something was verifiably in the public domain, then it can't be copyrighted, no matter how it was redone unless the redoing involved substantial creative change.

Answer 4

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