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Long John Latham And Lost Treasure Magazine


bigtim1973

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Ok I was just curious and I have been trying to find out without any luck so I am going to ask this question here......

Who owns the long John Latham magazine and lost treasure magazine copy rights? 

What if I wrote a little article about metal detecting research or whatever and wanted to use an old article or story for a reference that was in one of these old magazines that are no longer in print.....how would I go about  getting permission to use the old articles or the rights to use them??

Anyone know anything about this kind of stuff??

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Are you going to post here?  In a pay site?  My approach (and I'm no lawyer) is if I'm not making any $, as long as I give credit where credit is due (cite the title of the article, author, and publication, preferably timestamped in some way) then I don't concern myself, I just do it.  You may have noticed that I scanned a couple ads from a 1964 magazine and posted them in a recent thread.  I've done similar in the past, too.

You can always ask a copyright lawyer to get an official answer.  I don't know of any of those here.  But that doesn't mean others don't know something about it.  (It's Steve H's site, of course, say maybe he knows and I'm sure he has an opinion.)

BTW, I also have a lot of issues from first half of the 1970's of Latham's two magazines -- True Treasure and Treasure World (which were basically one magazine alternating issues by month, if I recall).  A lot of nostalgia going back through them, if nothing else.

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Getting permission is the way to go for sure, but if that is not possible then check into the Fair Use Doctrine. If you are just excerpting, commenting, or reporting on a small segment of the article then you can often use it, even if it's copyrighted. Basically, I think it boils down to relevancy and size of the excerpted piece. Your work must be clearly your own and the excerpted bit can't really be the entire focus of your content, it has to just be a minor part and you must be creating something "new" to call it your own.

This is something I became aware of while making videos, where people commonly take small segments of other people's content and include them in their own videos. But it applies to any media including print.

For instance: people would often steal my videos and then repost them as their own, except zoomed in, cropped, or removing audio/adding songs over my voice, adding nothing new, essentially just posting 100% of my content and collecting ad revenue on it for themselves. No attribution given to the original creator. This is a copyright violation (and the most common).

Similarly, claiming or branding someone else's content as your own is a copyright violation.

Grey area: people would take 10 to 15 second clips of all the popular nugget shooting videos and then compile them all into one larger video, just showing the nugget reveals. Collecting ad revenue for themselves. Might credit the original creator, might not. IMO this is copyright violation, but interpretation can vary. 

Not copyright violation: taking 5 seconds of my clip, showing it in a smaller window within the video while someone films themselves commenting on the clip, talking about equipment, using the clip to demonstrate good/bad technique, geology, whatever...making something new and original, and crediting the original creator of the excerpted clip. Few make the effort to be legit like this, but this is proper use of the Fair Use Doctrine.

The doctrine applies to print media, forums, videos, whatever. But research it yourself, the link I gave is a government website but there are lots of legal opinions you can Google as well.

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From the Fair Use Doctrine that Jason linked to, the following seems pertinent to at least some of bigtim's concerns:

"Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work:  Here, courts review whether, and to what extent, the unlicensed use harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work. In assessing this factor, courts consider whether the use is hurting the current market for the original work (for example, by displacing sales of the original) and/or whether the use could cause substantial harm if it were to become widespread."  (empasis mine)

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15 hours ago, bigtim1973 said:

Who owns the long John Latham magazine and lost treasure magazine copy rights?

Lee Harris owned it last, and I think he ran it for a very long time, maybe back to '79 when it switched from Long John Latham's. I would assume he got the rights to all the LJL articles since he often recycled them in later issues.

In any case, most everything prior to 1978 falls under the 1909 copyright act which provided 28 years of copyright protection. You could renew for an additional 28 years but most likely none of the magazine articles were renewed. Back then they had to be physically registered and that would have been a lot of work for a magazine.

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Under U.S. Copyright law anything created after 1925 is still copyright with very few exceptions. The fact that you can't find the current copyright owner doesn't provide an excuse for using their work.

Fair use is in brief pretty well covered by jasong except it's not legal to create a compilation of pictures/videos etc from other peoples work without their permission. The exceptions to copyright include small portions of a copyright work to illustrate a point for educational purposes. Also a work of satire based on an original copyright work is permitted. Small excerpts as a part of a critical review of the whole copyright work is also permitted.

There are no exceptions to copyright in a for profit endeavor. If you intend to make money from your work and you use someone else's creation you must get a written rights release from the copyright holder.

Copyright is created when the original work is produced. It used to be that a work had to be "published" (seen by someone besides the creator) first but that is no longer true. The law now boils down to "when it's created it's copyright".

If the original work is registered with the copyright office an infraction is three times value plus expenses, profits and lawyer and court fees. Always pricey.

There is no longer a requirement  to label your original work as copyright. It's a very good idea to include a copyright notice and date as well as "all rights reserved" but it's still theft to use someone else's creation without permission outside of the educational/satire/review exceptions.

Copyright is a lot more complex than any discussion on a forum can cover. The pre 1964 renewal, pre 1979 notice and a whole bunch of other quirks are built in to a system that has changed a lot over the years. Here's a brief outline that covers more of the subject of fair use (but not all).

Written by a guy with thousands of copyrights to enforce.

Barry

 

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