[HNW] A Pictorial History of Embroidery

[Allison263 at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/28/07 12:07:09 AM, fran at lavoltapress.com writes:


> BTW--has absolutely no
> bearing on whether copyright theft damages the publishing industry as a
> whole. I've worked in the publishing industry for over 23 years.  I
> dount you have.  It does.
> 
I think this is unnecessarly harsh. I, too, have worked in the publishing 
industry for over 20 years and I'm a published author dozens of times over.   I'm 
a big believer in copyrights, trust me, and I completely disagree with your 
incredibly rude comments. 

For the purposes of what we do, I don't think making personal copies of a 
fairly obsure, out of print work for personal research and study is a problem. If 
someone made mass copies of the book and sold them, that would be wrong and 
illegal. Yes, copyright law/fair use is very vague, even copyright lawyers 
agree on that point, but I deeply doubt that anyone is going to come knocking on 
our doors because we made a bad xerox of this book on a library copy machine.

And who, exactly, do you think that we're "stealing" this book from? Are you 
versed in the publishing history of this particular book and who, exactly owns 
the copyright? The book was originally published by Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 
Tubingen, Germany, in 1963. If you are well versed in German copyright law, then 
you can certainly tell us whether they retain copyright and if we should send 
a check to them. However, the English translation was done by none other than 
the great Donald King and copyrighted by Thames and Hudson in 1963. If you are 
certain that THEY still own the copyright, then by all means let us all know. 
In addition, some of us own French translations of the book. Who owns THOSE 
copyrights? Are we stealing from them, too? And while we're at it, since the 
book consists mainly of photos, you could also argue that we're stealing 
royalties from every single museum, church, cathedral, and collection in Europe each 
time we make a copy of one of those old, B&W, sometimes fuzzy, images in 
Schuette.

The U.S. publisher of the book was Frederick Praeger, Inc, in 1964. Praeger 
is now Greenwood publishing out of Connecticut, who likely doesn't own any 
copyright to the book. My guess is that they purchased limited rights to publish 
the book in the U.S. The book was published under two different titles, 
"Pictorial History of Embroidery" in the U.S and "Art of Embroidery" in the U.K, 
which means that if we don't want to steal anything we should probably send our 
money to both places just to, you know, make sure. And how much, exactly, should 
we be paying for our theivery? The original cover price of the book? The 
going rate from used/rare book sellers, maybe? What it cost us per page to make 
all those bad xeroxes?

It's very possible that Schuette is an "orphan," which is a copyrighted work 
in which the copyright can no longer be determined. I don't know this for a 
fact, but it's likely given its publishing history. If that is the case, then 
fair use laws are much more relaxed. It also very well could be one reason why 
the book has never been reprinted, although I'd guess it's the cost of renewing 
the rights to all those pictures that makes it too expensive. 

A big thiefs I am!
Gabrielle



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