I learned from the Salinger suit that writers do own their words; recipient owns the letters they got them on. So, VF is in legal trouble.

[Mark Kohut]

Letters to a person are seldom "unpublished work".....they are personal
letters.

In May 1986 Salinger learned that the British writer Ian Hamilton
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hamilton_(critic)> intended to publish a
biography that made extensive use of letters Salinger had written to other
authors and friends. Salinger sued to stop the book's publication and
in *Salinger
v. Random House <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinger_v._Random_House>*,
the court ruled that Hamilton's extensive use of the letters, including
quotation and paraphrasing, was not acceptable since the author's right to
control publication overrode the right of fair use.[121
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger#cite_note-lubas-122>

On Fri, Nov 29, 2024 at 4:40 PM Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not the sort of law that I do, but the Wikipedia page about the Salinger
> case says, in part:
>
> [I]n response to concerns about the implications of this case on
> scholarship, Congress amended the Copyright Act in 1992 to explicitly allow
> for fair use in copying unpublished works, adding to 17 U.S.C. 107 the
> line, "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding
> of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above
> factors."
>
>
>
> On Nov 29, 2024, at 1:18 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That will probably be the argument but it didn’t work for the Salinger
> biographer. Theses are personal letters not bits from a book for a review
> or teaching.
>
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2024 at 3:42 PM Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Wouldn’t that be considered fair use?
>>
>> > On Nov 29, 2024, at 10:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > https://x.com/AmericanGwyn/status/1862546724369129799
>> > --
>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
>