Laying Claim to the Public Domain

21 December 2006

We recently bought The Real Mother Goose book for our daughter, who is home from the hospital now and doing fine. I was reading some rhymes from it this evening and happened to turn to the copyright page in the front.

One thing interesting about this page is that there isn’t actually a copyright notice. It says, “This book was originally published in 1916,” which would place it in the public domain in the United States, but then there is also this:

No part of this work may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

So what is going on here? Setting aside the complete denial of fair use rights, is this an enhanced and updated 3D version in today’s modern English so that a new copyright is in force? The text isn’t reproducible? How about the images? (The beautiful illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright.) There’s just this blanket claim to the entire work. We’re led to believe we have no right to the content in this book. No right to nursery rhymes that have been around for hundreds of years and are a deeply embedded part of our culture.

It lends support to what Creative Commons is trying to do: make it clear what rights are available with a given work. Purveyors of copyright who scream bloody murder at the “theft” of their “intellectual property” apparently have no compunctions about laying claim to things of which they have no right. I’m sure there are some things about the printed book to which they have a legal right under copyright law, but I’m also certain that they don’t own the copyright to the entire work. It’s funny that they wouldn’t want to make it clear what the rights of the public are.

To verify the status of the book, I checked on Project Gutenberg and was delighted to find a public domain rendition of the book, complete with scanned images. (The images in this post came from there.)

Do you think Scholastic will send me a DMCA takedown notice if I start regularly posting these rhymes along with the images from Project Gutenberg? I’d be using parts of their work without first contacting the Ministry of Permissions, after all.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 21 December 2006 at 3:30 am
filed under copyright, rhymes

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Comments

Hi,
I think the objection Scholastic might have is with you taking the
images from their web site and using them without their permission since they have gone through the trouble of reproducing them to put on the web. If you had a copy of the book and scanned and used the images, that would be different because you have a copy of the original work which is in the public domain. There have been court rulings about “slavish reproductions” of public domain art work; the whole thing is very complicated and hard to understand, if you ask me. I have a lot of public domain pictures on my web site (from works prior to 1923) including nursery rhymes that I have scanned from the original source material. You can find them at Public Domain Images.

Posted by Karen on 27 December 2006 at 3:14 pm

Oops. I just realized that you’re talking about Scholastic’s reproduction of the book. I think what I wrote above still applies. You can’t copy or reproduce their book, but if you bought the original you could — just like Scholastic did.

Posted by Karen on 27 December 2006 at 3:17 pm

Hi, Karen. Thanks for visiting and commenting. I think if Scholastic is using public domain text and images that they shouldn’t be able to “re-encumber” them, just because they reproduced them in one way or another. I agree that it’s best to work with source texts that are in the public domain, but these can be hard to find.

Of course with the way copyright works today, if they created a derivative work, they could then lock that new work up for three or four hundred years, or whatever the length of copyright will be after Disney buys a few more congressmen and extensions. But now I’m sounding bitter. (That ever lengthening term is such a huge problem for preserving culture. After a hundred years–or two or three–goes by, much is lost that might have been preserved.)

Thanks for the links to your site — you have a great collection of public domain images. I quickly browsed around and look forward to using some of the images and to checking out your original work.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 27 December 2006 at 8:30 pm

Yes, I agree with you completely, which is why I’m involved with several sites to preserve the public domain (Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders ( http://pgdp.net/ ), Project Mutopia ( http://mutopiaproject.org/ ) and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP, http://imslp.org/ )), and do some transcription on my own, which I release under a CC-BY-SA license, so that if someone wants to lock the work I’ve done back up, they can’t, legally, and otherwise they have to let people know where they got it. It’s imperfect, I know, but I think it’s the best solution for now.

Anyway, I always hate it when I come across a work that’s clearly in the public domain that claims it’s not.

Now, IANAL, but I think that (unfortunately) re-engraving a work would qualify it for renewed copyright, but mere reprinting does not, which is why Dover Publications is such a great resource.

Posted by Geoff on 28 December 2006 at 10:17 am

Hi, Geoff. I gave the distributed proofreading a try this past year and enjoyed it, although I only did a few pages. It felt good to contribute to a great project like Gutenberg. I should make more time for it

Are you referring to those Dover “thrift” publications? I’ve bought several of them recently: Emerson, Thoreau, children’s books and miscellaneous fiction. What a great deal. I also have several of them on hold at Amazon to get me over the $25 free shipping line when necessary.

(Thanks for the pointers to the music sites — I bookmarked them in del.icio.us. I’m unfortunately not very musically inclined, but I like to be aware of free culture projects.)

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 29 December 2006 at 12:23 pm

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time lately for DP either, but I do a page or two when I can, which is what’s great about it… Even if most people only do a page or two, we get a lot done! :-)

I was specifically referring to the majority of Dover’s music score books, but the thrift editions are great, too. I’ve got an H.G. Wells set, and a Shakespeare set, not to mention the numerous others scattered about.

Happy New Year!

Posted by Geoff on 31 December 2006 at 12:12 pm

It’s pretty cut and dried about copyright and the public domain. Only original creative content is eligible for copyright. If Dover added commentary or editorial material that part would be copyrightable. Layout, fonts, pagination, etc do not qualify for copyright. Therefore their public domain materials do not qualify for copyright status. One only needs to remove any new copyrightable material from their books and it is pure public domain. Case closed. Let em take you to court and lose.

Posted by justaposter on 7 August 2007 at 12:22 pm

Hi, jp. Thanks for commenting. It was actually Scholastic overreaching on the copyright statement. Dover just came up later in comments. But point taken.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 7 August 2007 at 3:05 pm

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