Law, ownership, copyright, publishing question
 

This is just hypothetical.

Lets say that you had a relative pass away and you ended up with a bunch of old hand written letters passed down from a grandparent or great grand parent. Could you publish those and what would the legal ramifications be?

How about if the letters were written by someone who is still living but then mailed them to someone that has passed away and you received them being handed down from someone that had passed away?

Then does it change if you get into the digital realm of emails?

what about PMs on a social media site?

These are just some things that my wife and I were talking about yesterday, and I wondered what the brain trust would say.

There will be endless variables.

If the letter writer was a professional writer and has been published or had an agent it is very possible someone else owns the rights to the letters.

If one of the writers is still alive, it might be smart to get their permission. And the subject matter makes a big difference. If it is just romantic letters it is very different than letters from a person in the military writing about his experience in WW2.

Is there any real history in the letters or is it just family history and romance?

I'd wonder too. Who has the rights to a letter? The writer or the person who received it? Could this right be transferred to heirs?

Interesting question.

My thought (and my wife was quick to point out that it was just my guess/opinion) is that once you've mailed a letter to someone, you've effectively given it to them, so they own it. Once they own it, it can be passed down and their heirs would own it.

Of course, what if as the letter writer, you made a carbon copy or second copy to keep?

I am no lawyer but I own some copyrights.

Generally, any works are the property of the author.
Laws vary by country.

Work for hire in the US is owned by the employer by default unless it is retained by the author contractually.
In Canada it is owned by the author unless assigned to another contractually.

Any works of mine, regardless of who is in posession of those works, are mine unless I have assigned copyright to another person or entity ( in other words in the scenario above, if the person is still living, you should ask their permission before publishing)

There are allowances for fair use (excerpts) but again, asking permission is advised, especially if you plan to make money on them, otherwise the owner/author can sue you for the money (don't sell my stuff).
Laws in various countries differ.

A good example for the questions above are the books on your bookshelf. You own the book. You are in possession of the book, but you do not own the copyright.

Posts in a public forum are already in the public domain and are assumed publicly available unless protected.
COPYRIGHT (c) 2020 Wayner, all rights reserved.

I am happy to report that there are real answers to all of the questions you posed. Wayner's summary is pretty good. I'll follow up on that with broad strokes of the general rules.

All hard copy correspondence/artwork has two elements of ownership - the physical document and the copyright to the content of the letter/artwork. Ownership of one may or may not affect ownership of the other. The author of any writing has an automatic copyright on his work, regardless of whether it is registered or not. You can mark your work with a (c) but you don't have to to be protected. One of our members frequently marks his prophecies as copyrighted. (Not just Wayner in his example, above).

In general, if someone writes a letter and sends it to you, you own the actual letter but the sender retains the copyright on his work. You can sell the physical letter but you can't republish the contents. I don't believe you can republish photocopies of the original document, but I am not sure of that. There are exceptions for purposes of education, satire, etc., but I don't think you can sell copied images of the copyrighted text as a general rule. If you later have a falling out with the author, you can sell the actual letters to the National Enquirer or the Smithsonian, depending on how interesting they are.

So if you inherited old letters, you would own the physical letter for sure. You may own the copyright to the contents if you inherited the letters from the sender (maybe letters from your grandmother to your grandfather).

If the letters are old enough, any copyright has expired. Feel free to republish the works of Dickens or Poe. All their work is in the public domain. Also, if the contents of the letter are published by the author and the copyright is not protected, the contents pass into the public domain.

I'd quote wayner but it might violate his...


anyway - one more: beyond IP laws there could also be torts based on revealing something scandalous, etc.

something to think about

Why not contact the writier and tell them what you found? Are you an inheritor?

In the 21st Century copyrights are worthless. Dozens of articles and photographs that I created and I own copyrights to have been stolen and used on web sites. In the digital age everyone (almost) assumes that "copyright" means if they can copy it, they have the right to use it. I would go broke pursuing even a small percentage of the violations of my copyrights.

I'm afraid of the long-term effect this is going to have on research.
You can't afford to spend weeks or months researching a subject (in my case I did historical research) and the shoulder the expense of traveling the country visiting archives and doing interviews if the chances are:
A. no one will buy it because they know it will get stolen or
B. you publish it yourself and it gets stolen.
Writers and researchers have to eat, and I'll be damned if I would get into historical research today knowing I'd have to have a day job too to feed myself.

At our old aerial photography business where I was just an employee we copyrighted every print we sold. More than a few times we would catch some business using our copyrighted images to make multiple copies. The owner of our company got 20 grand more than once.

In the days of digital, it is a ton harder to prove it is your image in the first place.

This did all stem from a bunch of letters that my wife has that are to/from family. The bulk of these letters are between her grandmother and grandfather who are both deceased. She was given the letters by her grandmother before she passed away, and has wondered about using them in the future. I think these were mostly written about the same time as WWII. If they'd been written after 1978, it would be easy, the copyright runs from the death of the writer for 70 more years. Apparently, it's not quite as simple before that.

So I'm not entirely sure if that means that letters written by her grandmother to her grandfather and given to her by her grandmother before she died, but never copyrighted or published by her grandmother. Does that mean that the grandmother had protection until 2002 or 2047 or until 70 years after she passed away.

In most cases, the original folks involved have passed away. There are a few where the sender/writer is still alive, but I don't think those are of particular interest to my wife anyway.