Jeff,
copyright law is not based in torts (that is personal injuries) but has its basis in statutory law.
one frequent consideration when determining a copyright issue has to do with economic interest, but this is generally an issue regarding damages and not a consideration of whether a prima facie infringement has occurred. one thing to keep in mind is not whether the copyright holder is benefiting economicaly from the work or making the best economic use of the work. a work need not have any economic value at all nor the copyright owner have any intention to derive any economic benefit from the work, for the work to be copyrighted and the copyright holder to exercise all rights respecting the work.
one of the principal rights of a copyright owner is to control the disemination and distribution of the work.
the term of copyright protectoin from http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wci
is
-----
For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author’s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
----
and for pre -1978 works the expiration for (WTS) works is no sooner than 2047
-----
that would seem to suggest that virtually all WTS pubs are under copyright except for those personally authored or acknowledged like Russell's and Rutherford's which is their date of death plus 70 years.
---------
the E-Bay situation is a complicated one and it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out (assuming what has been reported as a WTS "policy" or tactic is true).
the reason why the WTS is on shaky ground with trying to shut down E-Bay sales of WTS publications themselves is because the ownership of a book or work itself is NOT the same as ownership of the copyright (obviously). thus when you buy a book at the bookstore, [I recommend Jim Cramer's Real Money and Mad Money :-)] you aren't buying any copyrights, just ownership of the thng itself as mere property. The law recognizes the right to transfer that property and that is all that E-Bay does - allow people to transfer their property to others.
On the other hand, you can buy a book but you aren't allowed to make photocopies afterwards and sell them out the back door or on E-Bay so that kind of activity will be an infringement. And keep in mind if the copy is from one medium to another, as in digitizing a copyrighted work and putting it on a CD-ROM it is still an infringement. - In part that was Quotes mistake to make CD-ROMs for sale that were copies of copyrighted materials and of course creating a webpage of copyrighted works in excess of Fair Use doctrine is an infringement.
