[MRM]

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.