Can a third party claim a production copyright on LibriVox recordings? Can they do that with something that is in the public domain? Is it legal if they do nothing or very little to alter it? For example, if they slow the tempo, add music here and there and change it very little, can they then own the production copyright?
This happened finally with a recording of mine, Ben Franklin's "The Way to Wealth," made in summer 2011 for LibriVox. A company called Oregan Publishing offers it now on Audible, sporting a production copyright. I wasn't that upset at first. At least the scavengers kept my name on it, though I'm pretty sure LibriVox has been edited out. But then I revisited a nice fellow who had published the recording for free on YouTube a while back and saw that the recording had been taken down due to "due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement." Now, if those scavengers have appropriated the recording to sell and are preventing that guy from sharing the LibriVox version, that's a problem. It's not ethical. Sell it if you want but you can't prevent someone from sharing the ORIGINAL file that has been unchanged.
Any thoughts on this matter?