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Archiver > COPYRIGHT > 2002-11 > 1037674130
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Subject: Re: [COPYRIGHT] Who Owns Copyright on Very Old Letters / was "Old letters pu...
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 21:48:50 EST
Cliff,
The letters themselves, copyright or no copyright, would be worth a fair
amount of money.
If you found a million dollars in a box in your parents' attic that everybody
else was going to toss in the garbage, would it be yours just because nobody
else wanted to look in the box?
Debbie
> Let me rephrase one of the important considerations. If my mother and
> father had died, and the home was soon to be sold, and I found Civil War
> letters of an ancestor in the attic (which was being cleaned out, and most
> things being thrown away), who owns the letters that I found? The writer
> was a high ranking officer
> in the war and not only described battles, but also many interactions with
> Abraham Lincoln and Ullyses S. Grant. Do I have to share the letters with
> siblings even though the letters would have been discarded had I not saved
> them (nobody was going to read them to see what they were about)? Who owns
> the copyright on
> them?
>
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