Basically I have a shit load of material from various infamous serial killers, the material is notes, essays, biographies and confessions etc. My question is - who owns the material? Some of the stories for example are printed copies with excerpts and stuff sent from the said serial killers... and some of which have been published before... Soooo who owns the copyrights to them? Can I upload them to say Lulu and sell them as my own property - of course giving credit to the serial killer. Cheers.
Did the excerpts and copies come from interviews by news journalists in the newspaper or on TV? You might have to do some digging to find out who the original authors of the works are. Unless the information came from the public domain, you may not be able to sell the information as your own.
You are going to need to research the origins of every piece. If you can't find the true copyright holder and obtain their permission, you might be out of luck. You might want to call the Australian copyright office (assuming there's a counterpart to the US one). Since you would be making a compilation of works by others, you may not be able to copyright each section but you may be able to copyright the 'compilation'. You might get better results from your question if you request a moderator to move this thread to the legal section. Copyright is a legal term while copywriting is about the writing of sales copy/pitches.
Some pieces are hand written or typed letters, similarly to the the stories that they tell - some are photo copies of stories that the freely gave away to pen pals. All the material came from the serial killer themselves. But - as the letters and material were distributed by the serial killers to a handful of pen pals... some of the material has already been published. For example I have "Nigger Jack" by Gerard Schaefer: A rare photo copy sent and signed by Gerard Schaefer - but his ex wife also received copies of all these stories and published a Book called "Killer Fiction", "Killer Fiction" was the name used by Gerard for the publications that he issued. "Nigger Jack" was one of the more violent and disturbing reads within the book. Killer Fiction was published by By "G. J. Schaefer, Sondra London, Colin Wilson" - although Schaefer later broke up with Sondra London and tried to sue her for using his work and publications. And the other pieces include letters, poems, short stories, short bio's, court documents etc. that were all sent personally from the serial killers to their pen pals - as I collect this shit - I have a huge pile of rare items. I was hoping to bypass the copyrights etc. by using LuLu or a similar "iBookstore Aggregator" - and by that I mean talking to one of the account managers (from LuLu) who help you publish the iBook for example.
Copyright extends 70 years after death - next of kin controls publication rights during that time. And, even if you have handwritten notes that have not been previously published, they still might be protected. Using LuLu does not 'bypass copyrights'. It is a vanity press where people can publish their own work without the need of finding a Random House or similar firm to publish the work for them. Copyright laws do not come and go depending upon how you publish something that may or may not contain works that belong to someone else. Possession of those works do not necessarily convey copyright. Then there's the issue of privacy laws and whether or not a prisoner can expect his correspondence to remain private. You have three issues here - copyrights held by the photographers, general copyright law and the rights of prisoners/convicts. Additionally, if any of the court proceedings were closed, there might be different laws governing their publication. Again, you are going to have to research the laws in your country and each country (if there's more than one) that the source material is from. More than likely each piece will have to be researched and there is no blanket answer here.
Most of them are already executed I was just going to get on this whole electronic book selling thing... ya know with iTunes, Amazon and eReaders etc. It would be a lot of work though to put the letters into electronic text... but there's some cool shit...