Re: copyright in the digitized object?

From: Stephen Fishman <sfish55[_at_]yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:25:24 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Roland J. Cole <cole[_at_]spi.org> wrote:
>
> We at SPI do thousands of pages of OCR on public domain documents.
> We know all the careful and sometimes very creative work that goes
> into choosing how to OCR, what to OCR, how to represent in text what
> was a picture, etc. I have no question that you have a copyright in
> the electronic version as a derivative work. Of course they could
> get the words from someone else, but your protection stems from the
> selection, arrangement, and presentation of those words. The
> counter-argument is a Feist style one -- that no matter how hard
> you worked, your selection and arrangement was as trivial as pure
> alphabetical order. I know in our cases that we consider we have
> done far more than that, and I assume you have as well.

Could you explain in a little more detail the type of work you do in scanning public domain documents that you regard as creativ"? When you scan them do you change the format or make other types of changes?

Stephen Fishman
<sfish55[_at_]yahoo.com>

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