Copyright question

Often it's because the artist who did the cover retains copyright on the cover.

Sometimes with a book the publisher want to retain rights to the "look and feel"; this is largely an issue with a book that has very specific layout in terms of presenting information—D.K. contracts will specify that D.K. owns rights to the design and layout, for instance, and the author owns the text.

And sometimes maps etc. are copyright the publisher or designer/artist.

Even when it says '(c) [the author]' it's often not meant to imply copyright over anything but the text.

HJW said:

Interesting , thanks. I thought maybe it was something to do with who owns the copyright on the characters.

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You can't copyright characters though; you can copyright what they say, but not the characters themselves.

In some circumstances, you can trade mark a character, especially if there are products associated with a work—say a film based on a novel, or a game, etc.

There may be ancillary material in a book that is not the product of the author of the text: preface, cover blurb, etc. That stuff is not under the copyright of the text author.

Plus what Medievalist posted. But some famous characters and the settings they occupy are trademarked. These would include the Tarzan franchise, still under trademark protection by the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, of course, the Harry Potter franchise, which would include all the characters, Hogwart's academy, etc.

In the instance of Tarzan, several of the early Tarzan books are in public domain, at least in the United States, and those texts may be freely reproduced. But you cannot produce a new Tarzan story based on the original characters and universe, without explicit consent of the trademark holders.

caw

This is getting sort of off-the-beaten-track, but before the U. S. agreed to various international copyright principles, and before the Berne convention accords, U.S. publishers were sort of, well, opportunistic.

Illegal "pirate" editions of H. G. Wells, Dickens, and Tolkien.

And so you can see interesting prefaces explaining that the book you're holding is the One True Complete and Authorized edition.

And sometimes, as with Wells' War of the Worlds, there will be several copyright statements, some of which refer to passages added by the legal British publisher to distinguish the One True Edition from opportunistic scurrilous U. S. editions . . . .