Can I sell a book of portraits one page at a time?

I have heard that people go to yard sales and buy old books with large photos/portraits. They then cut the portraits out of the book, jazz them up with nice frames and sell them at a profit.

Is this legal? What copyright laws apply? Is it possible that the book has entered the public domain and it is a non-issue?

If I understand what you’re describing, copyright wouldn’t apply. You aren’t making copies of a photo. Once you buy the book, you’re free to sell all or part of that book however you like.

anson has it. Copyright only applies to making copies, not to cutting up existing ones.

As a book/ print nerd, however, I have to inform you that the practice of dismembering books is eeevil.

Best stay away from Distributed Proofreaders then. When you send them a public-domain book to be done, they slice off the spine to free the pages, then run run them through an automated scanner for the page images. Very efficient, very destructive.

A co-worker just told me that this is a copyright infringement because it is a dirivitive work. I am not sure I follow that logic.

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

I agree. An extract from, or part of, a work is not a derivative work. If you are creating an extract as a copy, then it may be fair use or not, depending on how you use it and how large the extract is. But creating an extract by cutting to pieces a legitimate copy doesn’t infringe, any more than buying a copy of a newspaper or magazine and cutting out an article from there is – even if republishing that article by making copies of it would be.

I guess I’d better not frame that Picasso I bought then.

Meaning – I don’t really see how this could possibly be considered a derivative work uner the law unless all framing jobs were.

No, it’s not a derivative work. Not even close.

There are two issues: the physical object, and the copy. You own the object – CD, book, DVD, video, etc. You can do whatever you want with it except make copies. Once you purchase a book, it’s yours to do anything other than copy.

This is why used book stores are legal: no copy is being made. I know a local bookstore that frames prints of old magazines and sells those. Setting aside the barbarism of slicing up the magazines, it’s perfectly legal.

A derivative work is making a movie of your book, or writing a sequel to a copyrighted book.

The basic rule is to ask, “Once I’ve completed what I want to do, will there be more copies of the work than before I began?” If the number remains the same, it’s not a copyright issue.

Haven’t we proved definitively on the Dope that any statement beginning with “a co-worker told me” is wrong? :slight_smile:

What if the co-worker is a fellow doper? :stuck_out_tongue:

Is this a general rule? Say, for example, I were to stream a copyrighted movie to my computer (I believe streaming involves creation of temporary buffer files which are deleted after viewing). At the end of the movie there would be no more copies than before, but surely this can’t get round the copyright law?

FYI,

This was sent to me from the above co-worker. I guess it is illegal under copyright law.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/derivative/faq.cgi

**Question: Can I cut photographs out of a book, frame them, and sell them separately as “prints”?

Answer: Probably not. In essence, what you would be doing is creating a new work based on preexisting copyrighted material—the book of photographs. In one famous case, a person cut pages out of a collection of prints of the work of Patrick Nagel, mounted those pages on tiles and sold them separately. See Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque ART Co., 856 F.2d 1341, 1343 (9th Cir. 1988). The page-cutter argued that he had bought the book and therefore had a right to dispose of that copy of the book any way he wished, under the “first sale” doctrine. The Ninth Circuit held that the tiles were derivative works and infringed on Nagel’s copyright. In other words, the book buyer has the right to re-sell the particular book he has bought, but not to sell reframed pieces of the book. **

Not that this practice is anything new. Yesterday I saw a fascinating exhibit of art from the Mewar region of India. Several of the works were pages cut out of 16th century books of paintings. These pages have since been dispersed around the world. Of course, 16th century Mewari copyright law possibly differs from our today.

Somebody needs to tell all those people on eBay who slice & dice the big quarto, etc., collections of photographs of NDNs done a century or so ago, and sell the individual pages. It’s a crying shame how many wonderful books have been massacred in the name of profit.

Or point this out to eBay? Sometimes they are responsive to such issues.

If you’re going to post that FAQ from ChillingEffects, then you also have to look at the next one.

These are obviously contradictory decisions. There is no current national standard for this.