I don’t know if it’s ever resulted in lawsuits, but I know that it’s an ongoing issue in stand-up comedy about comedians who steal jokes they’ve heard other comedians deliver. In many cases, the jokes were scripted (and therefore covered by copyright) but they are other cases where a joke is improvised in the middle of a performance.
Robin Williams was notorious for this; when he was ad-libbing he fired off funny lines and in many cases they were things he had heard other comedians say. Williams at least acknowledged this and he would pay other comedians when they pointed out he had used their material.
As Chuck said, the time was covered by a completely different copyright law. Even whole pirated books were sold with no consequences. Go look up Charles Dickens and see how furious he was on the issue.
Yes, they wanted their words to be widely disseminated. In today’s world, all they’d have to do is make a recording as they spoke and their words would be copyright, no matter how public they made them - because they were private citizens. Everything the government says and does (with a few minor exceptions) is free of copyright. Does that mean that every campaign speech by a sitting representative is free to be reprinted? I think so, but I’m not sure. Attribution would be crucial in any case. Claiming it as your own would get the press down on you, as many have found out to their cost.
Other writings are also affected by intention. It’s normally acceptable to reprint publicity and promotional material in whole because that’s its purpose. It’s not acceptable to reprint the whole of the work being promoted, though. Copyright is nuance all the way down.
This isn’t really a copyright issue. Joke stealing would be frowned upon no matter what the law said.
Courts would hate to get involved in these matters for a practical reason. Two comics may tell the “same” joke, but they’ll undoubtedly change a word or a whole setup in doing so. Where and when does it change enough to be original? I’ve listened to multiple late-night monologues covering the same news with the “same” joke. The writers undoubtedly came up with the jokes independently. Robin Williams often excused himself by saying that when he was riffing he spouted lines that popped up in his head. Some of them he had heard before, some of them were original. In some cases, it could be proven that he was there when another comic said them. In others…
It just seems strange to me. As a writer, I’m sure you’d agree that the hard work is coming up with the words in your mind. Putting them down on a piece of paper afterwards is just a minor physical task. But the fixed in tangible form principle reverses this and seems to declare that writing the words down is the key factor rather than putting the words together.
Picture Fyodor Dostoevsky creating The Gambler. According to the logic of this principle, the person who was really creating the work was his secretary (and future wife) Anna Grigoryevna, who he dictated the story to. It’s obviously absurd to argue that Grigoyevna rather than Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler.
All that said, I can see the practical difficulties of basing the copyright principle around who first expressed the words rather than who first wrote them down. There would be a mass of cases where people would claim to have created some famous (and money making) work without having any physical evidence to support their claim. So expediency trumps logic.
It sounds like you want to do this without their permission, and are asking us if you would be on sound legal ground to do so. Legal issues aside, publishing someone else’s emails to you without their permission ranges from poor etiquette to unethical.
It’s worth noting that Lincoln lost the election (despite apparently winning the popular vote). But the debates dramatically increased his national stature two years before the presidential election of 1860.
Under the law, the transcriber is not “really creating the work.” The ownership goes to the actual author, under whose direction the fixation is being made. But the fixation must be made in order for the law to protect the work. It’s a necessary step. The law needs something tangible to give protection to.
What newsworthiness exception are you referring to? It’s true that under 7 U.S. Code § 107, certain uses of copyrighted material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”
Reporting on a speech is certainly allowed. Quoting pieces of a speech is definitely Fair Use. But taking the whole of a work is normally explicitly outside the bounds of Fair Use.
The only exception I can see is that the work was never copyright in the first place. But that’s not answered by newsworthiness.
Exapno Mapcase beat me to the punch, but this is worth emphasizing, because it seems to get ignored a lot in the modern world: There is no “newsworthiness exception.”
News reporting is one of the areas explicitly mentioned in the Title 17 section on Fair Use, but the use of copyrighted material for news reporting is still subject to the four-pronged test applied to all fair use cases. You can’t simply reproduce the entirety of a copyrighted work and then throw your hands in the air and say it’s all good because you’re just reporting the news.