Who owns copyright on personal letters

Can I use an image of the actual letter? I hope to show how difficult it is for them to re-integrate and that most of the problems originate from substance abuse. Also, can I use the entire letter as long as I remove all identification? I'm not a lawyer but would not think giving anonymity to the author would prevent copyright infringement.

It could be compared with a person uploading a record to YouTube and thinking because they did not mention who the singer or composer was that it would be OK. In my opinion permission would need to be obtained from the writer before lengthy quotes or photographs of the letters were used.

As said I am not a lawyer and could be wrong - I'm just giving an opinion based on my limited but growing knowledge of copyright law. Home Disclaimer About.

If I send you a letter, unless I have an agreement with you to the contrary, I continue to own the copyright. As the recipient of the letter, you own the letter itself -- the paper and ink. You can show the letter to others, sell it, give it to a friend, donate it to a library, preserve it, or with one possible limited exception I will come to in a moment destroy it. Or to put it in a more lawyerly way, absent an express writing to the contrary, transfer of ownership of the tangible physical property of the letter from me to you does not carry with it the transfer of the copyright.

As the recipient of the letter, you cannot, however, publish the entirety of the letter without my consent except for another possible limited exception I will come to in another minute. The reproduction right remains with me, as the copyright owner -- as does the right to create a derivative work.

If you find my letter housed in a scholarly library, the library's permission to reproduce it will ordinarily not suffice unless I assigned my copyright to the library. You will need to obtain permission from me or, if I'm dead, my heirs. You and others can, however, quote portions of the letter I sent you, to the extent permitted by fair use.

Alas, there are no bright lines as to what constitutes fair use -- no clear assurances that quoting, for example, 30 words from a two-page unpublished letter is surely fair use, while quoting words from the same letter is not. It is certain, however, that, because a letter is a short work, the number of words that you can safely quote is far smaller than the number you could safely quote from a longer work.

You must also quote sparingly from other short works, such as song lyrics and poetry. For a while, there was disturbing uncertainty as to whether you could quote anything at all from an unpublished letter. The fair use of unpublished letters and diaries was the subject of a series of cases about 20 years ago in which my firm and I represented the defendant biographers and publishers: Salinger v.

Random House , New Era v. Henry Holt see also this decision denying en banc rehearing , and Wright v. Warner Books. Ultimately in the Wright case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals clarified that some amount of quotation from unpublished works, such as letters and diaries, can qualify as fair use. Congress then codified this finding by amending Section of the Copyright Act to add this sentence: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Despite the Wright decision and the amendment to Section , unpublished status is still a factor to be considered in the fair use analysis, which tilts in the copyright owner's favor. So, as a general matter, publishers advise their authors to quote less from unpublished letters than they might quote if the same letters had previously been published. I am surely no authority on British law, but my impression is that, under the doctrine of "fair dealing" the UK equivalent to "fair use" , unpublished status takes on even greater importance than it does in U.

See this good discussion by Emily Goodhand , aka copyrightgirl, comparing the U. As with any quotation, the more you "transform" what you are quoting -- comment upon it, analyze it, criticize it, put it into a larger context -- the more likely it is that your use will be found to be "fair use. Don't forget that copyright protects expression, not facts and ideas. So, even though you can only quote a limited number of words from a letter, you may still be able to summarize and discuss the facts and ideas contained therein at greater length, as long as you do so in your own words avoiding close paraphrase.

Letters written by U. The same is not necessarily true of letters written by state government employees or government employees in other countries. Where the owner of the letter is not the copyright owner, they must first seek permission from the copyright owner before reproducing the letter. However, copyright does not prevent the recipient of a letter from showing the original letter to another third party as this does not involve reproduction. You are here:. Information: Letters. Any answers?

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