Does Anyone Know About Copyright Law Relating To Scans Of Books In The Public Domain?
July 9th, 2009 at 10:25pm Under copyright law
Specifically, if I take a book from 1880 (obviously in the public domain), scan it, convert it to PDF, and sell it on Ebay as a PDF, do I have any rights under copyright law that could deter someone from buying that pdf from me and turning right around and selling it themselves?
Put more abstractly, if a text is in the public domain and my only contribution to it is to digitize it from an old book into a pdf or other format, can the result be copyrighted?