I have a month-long Ebay email conversation that I’ve turned into a publishable (a semi-local cycle magazine wants to publish it) cautionary tale about the inadequecies of email vs. actually speaking face to face. The emails are largely verbatim, though names have been changed.
My question is this: Even though these mails are only between this other person and myself, with no expressed copyright prohibition from Ebay or any forum, does this other person own these mails?
Thanks, Joe
Yes. According to US copyright law, an expression of an idea is copyrighted as soon as it is “fixed in tangible form,” which includes electronic documents that can be read by means of a computer.
IANAL, but whether the owner of copyright would have a case against you for violation of copyright varies. Obviously you can’t go wrong by getting permission, but I doubt that would be feasible in your case.
I thought the author had to say it was copyrighted. If it goes out without a copyright statement, then it is public.
Not true.
10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained (contains useful links)
United States Code, Title 17 (copyright law)
Scarlett is correct. E-mail has copyright protection; the requirement for a copyright notice was dropped in 1977.
However, unless the sender registered the copyright, the protection is limited. Infringement brings a court order to stop the publication; in theory, actual damages can be awarded, but that’s next to impossible to prove.
You’re going to have to ask permission of the person who sent the e-mails.
This is also true for old love letters on paper. Just in case you were wondering.
The requirement under U.S. law for a proper copyright notice was dropped in 1989, not 1977. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989. Any work originally published in the U.S.* before March 1, 1989 without a proper copyright notice is in the public domain.
Not quite. Works published before Jan 1, 1978 without a copyright notice are in the public domain. From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html
Walloon is definitely correct that the registration requirement was a part of U.S. copyright law until the adoption of the Berne Convention, but I believe at least some public domain works which had been printed w/o a registration statement were retroactively given copyright protection.
Anyway, to make clear, this side discussion isn’t germane to the OP; those emails are clearly the intellectual property of the person who wrote them, regardless of registration statement or any other action he may have made. Absent a waiver, essentially anything you write down is copyrighted by you.
–Cliffy
Editorial vs Commercial intents also play a part.
yes she/he owns them. however copyright has exceptions including the write to use it in a news story. since it is for a magazine you should be fine.
Not they don’t, except as one of many considerations when determining fair use. A newspaper has no more right to violate copyright than anyone else. And the courts have ruled that taking an excerpt of an unpublished letter is a copyright violation (Blame J.D. Salinger, who sued an author to published excerpts of his letters and got a ruling in his favor).
Nope. The law grants no blanket exemption for newspapers or magazines. They’d need to prove fair use, and the Salinger ruling is dead against them. (Granted, news reporting is considered one of the legitimate reasons for claiming fair use, but it does not trump other factors.)
I’ve often wondered if something as simple and mundane as a shopping list scrawled onto the back of an envelope or a “Back at 2:00” message on a Post-It™ note is eligible for copyright protection under the current laws. Certainly a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Why?
If someone actually cares enough about your shopping list to want to re-use it in some context, then doesn’t that make it important enough to be copyrightable? And if nobody wants to use it, then what does it matter?
But isn’t there a minimum copyrightable length?
If the OP has changed the names, does he still need to ask permission? And what if the emails are, as the OP says, “largely verbatim”?
Yes he still needs to ask permission.
I don’t understand your question about “largely verbatim” nor why you would think that would influence the answer.
Because it’s not verbatim. If it’s not the actual words, why would the other person need to grant permission?
And if authors don’t need to ask people for permission if they change the names of characters, why should the OP?
Hold on there. I made no statement regarding registration, only regarding the inclusion of a proper copyright notice on a published work. Those are two different things. In fact, registration has never been required under U.S. copyright law for a claimant to hold a valid copyright.
RealityChuck, the appeal court’s ruling in Salinger v. Random House, Inc. did not introduce the concept of a common law copyright (i.e., of unpublished works). Common law copyrights have been recognized by courts for centuries. Instead, the court’s ruling in Salinger said that biographer Ian Hamilton could not take the “expressive content” of Salinger’s letters without Salinger’s permission, and that even paraphrasing closely, as Hamilton did, constituted taking the “expressive content.” Essentially, the court’s ruling raised the “fair use” bar much higher.
refusal, I refer you to that same U.S. Copyright Office circular to which you linked:
The 1976 Copyright Act became effective January 1, 1978.
Surely you understand the difference between paraphrasing and leaving most of the text intact by changing only a few words (that is, identifying names and other details). In the second case, most of the original expression of the idea is still there.
Similarly, there’s a difference between writing about real people by disguising their identity AND lifting their original copyrighted writings and publishing them under your own name.