Q. What is a copyright?

The copyright law grants owners of copyright (authors and other creators and publishers) the sole right to do or allow others to do each of the following acts with regard to their copyrighted work: to reproduce all or part of the work, to distribute copies, to prepare new (derivative) versions based on the original work, to perform and display the work publicly.

Copyright protection covers both published and unpublished works. The fact that a previously published work is out of print does not affect its copyright.