"Scanning Images and Office Depot" Topic

I recently went to Office Depot in order to have some images from a book scanned onto a floppy disk. I was told, however, that they would only scan such images if one could provide written permission from the book's publisher, a stipulation which seems entirely impractical. I pointed out to the Office Depot worker that the images in question were 19th century newspaper prints and therefore within the public domain but she appeared unmoved. I have previously had images scanned by Office Depot and wonder if this is a new policy or whether the particular employee I spoke to was mistaken. Assuming she understood rightly the company's policy, can anyone recommend another means by which I might get these images scanned for use on my website. Thanks in advance.

your local library may have a scanner available.

You can't use logic where the law and corporate policy intersect.

The images were not 19th century prints (originals), they were pages in a book that has an obvious copyright. While the images may in fact be PD its not up to the clerk at Office Depot to make that call.

It's probably been company policy from day 1. I remember trying to scan gaming material in the mid-80's and getting rebuffed until I produced an explicit approval (thankfully written in the book itself.)

Now, if you want the images and know what they are entitled then you probably can save yourself a lot of time by searching google images, live.com images and so forth. I hardly scan anything these days because someone else already has.

Good luck. Hopefully the library will be softer on your fair use rights than Office Depot was.

Buy your own scanner! They're not that expensive these days.

I tried to scan some fold-your-own paper boxes I drew and they refused at Kinko's. So I went home, put a copyright under my name on it, showed them my I.D. and they went ahead and scanned it. Go figure.

When I went to get my christmas cards printed they refused due to the fact that the art had a copyright on it. An original piece of art with my name on the copyright, had to get a manager involved before they would scan it for the cards.

Gee, what is it with you guys? Are scanners that expensive in the States?

Hmm, couple hundred bucks for a really high quality scanner or .15-25 cents a copy. Hmm.