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You could, and safely. See here.
Under UK law,
The extent of copyright
Copyright automatically covers almost all original written works. Although copyright legislation often refers to "literary works", copyright applies regardless of the quality of the writing. Copyright subsists in both published and unpublished works, and extends to manuscripts, single scraps of paper, and private correspondence.
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Duration of copyright in unpublished writings
Unpublished papers used to enjoy extended copyright protection in most countries. In Britain until 1 August 1989, all unpublished writings (manuscripts, typescripts, computer discs and print-outs, letters, marginalia, and all sorts of notes - extending to shopping lists and messages in birthday cards) enjoyed "perpetual copyright". From 1 August 1989 (the date of implementation of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), the distinction between published and unpublished writings is to be progressively abolished. To protect the interests of living copyright-holders, however, a 50-year transition period has been adopted. So any author's manuscripts (including those of authors who died many hundreds of years ago) could in theory be copyright-protected until 31 December 2039. WATCH has not yet become aware of copyrights persisting from much before the period of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
...and finally, what we want...
The distinction between the owner and the copyright holder
Especially with manuscripts and other unpublished sources, it is important to distinguish between the owner of the document and its copyright holder. The owner may be the copyright-holder, but very often is not. Ownership confers the right to remove, sell or even destroy unpublished materials, but it does not confer the rights covered by copyright law. A letter from Thomas Hardy to Queen Victoria, for example, may be in the ownership of the present Queen of England, but the Queen cannot publish the letter or even reproduce it on her Christmas cards, without the permission of the Hardy estate.
Ownership and copyright being two things that tend to get conflated a bit in this respect. You'll find that the terms of you submitting a letter to some places is that you *give up* your copyright entitlements in order to be printed... |
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