On Thursday, December 28, 2000, evelyn sell <[email protected]> wrote: > 1. Can a person claim she has copyrights to all the information, > because a family member died and left her all of her records. Information cannot be copyrighted. No ifs, ands, or buts. Only the original expression of that information can be copyrighted. > 2. How can she say the other people who had worked with the one who died > did not have the rights to use it and then say all of the information was > stolen when they used it. It doesn't matter who worked with whom, the information, if given freely from one person to another, is not "stolen". > 3. Can this person use your name, dates, full copies of birth > certificates, marriage license, to put in a book they are supposed to be > finishing up for the dead person. ( I thought all living people were > supposed to be put as private etc. Or how does this work to post family > members. I don't think there is anything you can do about this situation. There is a convention that living people should either be excluded (my preference) or else no information besides name and relationship be published about them. But it is simply a convention, not a law. Once someone has given information to another person, they cannot control how that person uses it. But remember, vital records like marriage licenses are public records to which anyone has access. Putting them together in a book or publishing it on the web might make the access easier, though. Courtesy would dictate observance of the person's wishes here, but it sounds like your situation is long past that :-). > 4. Who has the copyright on pictures. The woman who died gave copies of > pictures to others from her originals to use. Now the one who is working on > the papers, state they are hers and cannot be used.? The estate of the deceased has the copyright. It should then be the executor of the estate (or trustee if they exist) who can decide how those pictures are used. The pictures given to others can only be republished if that was the stated desire of the copyright holder (or subsequently the estate). This might be hard to establish if there is no written evidence that the deceased has authorized this. But if it isn't brought to the attention of the executor/trustee, they might not notice. > 5.. On pictures you gave to the dead woman, can the one who is finishing her > work use them anyway she wants and claim they are hers. No, they belong to the deceased's estate, but you (or others) retain the copyright, and can attempt to prevent any further copying. The doctrine of fair use might seem to allow their use within a larger work, but this has been successfully fought in court based on the significance of the included work (its relative fraction of the compiled work is irrelevant). Photos seem to be considered pretty significant. But only a court battle would determine this. > 6. Can she copyright all of these records, pictures, as she said her > copyright lawyer has done for her. These items were copyrighted by their authors when they were created. The author can at best claim a "compilation" copyright. S R C A cott obert ranston nderson [email protected]