So no, these scans are not the rightful property of whoever took the trouble to scan them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright...
Why is this difference important? Many courts upheld slavery as a legal institution for quite a long time, and then in a fairly short span, they stopped. This change happened because increasing numbers of intellectuals of all stripes were changing their minds on the issue, and driving the courts to move along with their ideas. You can't simply point to what the law happens to be right now and claim an intellectual victory.
But lets discuss the moral implications. On what moral foundation do you base your statement? What example cases would your supposition provide the greater societal good?
Um, back up a second. Why do you assume that the interests of others is the standard of every ethical system?
I have an entirely different view: an individual's own life is the standard by which they must judge what's good and bad for them. I always think to myself, "Am I going to live the best, longest life I can if I choose this thing and not that? I only get one shot at my life, so I better do everything I can to make the most of it."
When I went to college, I choose my major on the basis of what I was interested in, not what someone else thought society needed. Same thing for my career. And I fell in love with my wife because of the person she was (and still is), not because doing so would provide some vague benefit to society, or even to strangers just down the street.
[And before you go there, this ethical standard of mine is not harmful to others. A person cannot truly benefit in the long term by lying, cheating, stealing, defrauding, and the like. Think of what kind of low way Bernie Madoff regarded himself over the last 25 years. He knew he built nothing, amounted to nothing. Look at how he lived in constant terror of being caught, how he lied to virtually everyone he knew, how he ended up in jail, and after all that, how his son committed suicide.
Imagine how much better his life could have been if he had tried to think about what was truly good for himself early on. Had he done that, he would have stopped, admitted his mistake, closed his business, paid penalties, and moved on. He'd still have his family (or at least his children), and although it would have been hard, he would have had a much better life for it.]
I just can't go and prevent other people from copying my copy.
What about digital restoration, which often includes reconstruction of missing parts of the document? What if you do significant work to uncover a document hidden within a layer, as is the case with the Archimedes Palimpsest? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest)
I'm not making the argument that such images ought never to be available freely to the public. All I'm saying is that the terms of release ought to be up to the individual or institution that's doing the work, and that it's the government's job to protect that right.