[masraum]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

Works in Existence but Not Published or Copyrighted on January 1, 1978
The law automatically gives federal copyright protection to works that were created but neither published nor registered before January 1, 1978. The duration of copyright in these works is generally computed the same way as for works created on or after January 1, 1978: life plus 70 years or 95 or 120 years, depending on the nature of authorship. However, all works in this category are guaranteed at least 25 years of statutory protection. The law specifies that in no case would copyright in a work in this category have expired before December 31, 2002. In addition, if a work in this category was published before that date, the term extends another 45 years, through the end of 2047

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.

Originally Posted by RWebb

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

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.