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We have published three books concerning very detailed genealogical records. They are protected by copyright. Our commentary and conclusions about various relationships are ours, yet folks will copy this stuff out of our books onto the Mormon forms, file them with the appropriate church authorities, and away that material goes into the archives to be published and distributed all over the world.

I am in complete support of your rights over your conclusions, your commentary, and your presentation. But it does irk me to no end to see a photostatic copy of a page out of the census records with a copyright notice on the bottom of it. Just because someone photocopies a page off of the 1860 census they think they have a copyright on it.

Just because someone photocopies a page off of the 1860 census they think they have a copyright on it.

Technically they do, on their image. This does not preclude you making your own copy off the same original, public domain census. Quite likely it also does not preclude your transcribing the information as text, since your result in that case could not in any way be distinguished from the result if you had used the original.

If it also said "Page 68" and was bound in a book, then certainly they have a copyright, but not of the form, nor of the material - just the placement within their book.

An example of where a copyright could be construed over such material would be a book where the 5 or 6 pages leading up to "page 68" and the 5 or 6 pages following were an exact reproduction of the original work prepared by a different author.

My copyright might not be very good concerning certain things, but all it has to do is be better than your copyright to prevail.

The Washington Post appended their "Warshpost copywrite" thing on the George Bush inaugural speech. Showing them what their copyright was worth, I copied the whole thing elsewhere and put my own copyright on it.

That's a case where neither party has any sort of claim to the intellectual property rights involved and is asserting a copyright out of spite.

Just because someone photocopies a page off of the 1860 census they think they have a copyright on it.

I would like to see a two-tier "restoration copyright" recognized in law. The first tier would be for much shorter duration than conventional copyright (e.g. three to five years) but would apply to direct reproductions of the original materials. Such a copyright would encourage people who have rare material to publicize it in unaltered form, something for which there is today little incentive.

The second tier would apply to material which is based on previously-published work, but which involves substantial editorial or technical adjustment [e.g. restoring an old movie, using computers to reconstruct portions of frames which are not in usable condition]. The term of this would be much longer--perhaps equal to normal copyright--but with a twist: all source materials used in the restoration would be subject to the first-tier copyright structure, and after the the first-tier copyright term on those materials had expired the publisher of the restoration would have to either make good copies of such materials to anyone who paid a certain statutory price structure, or supply such materials to a recognized repository that could do so. The price structure I'd have in mind would be pretty steep [e.g. $250 for two hours of movie filmed to VHS or DVD; $5,000/hour for 35mm film] but since the material thus acquired would be royalty-free, redistributors would probably not find such prices unaffordable].