copyright infringment?

What is the name of your state? Maryland. A guy runs this website, he says that everything on the website has copyrights. My question is can someone copyright something that does not belong to them, pictures, interviews, speeches, etc.

Scenario: someone else took pieces from an interview, from this website and posted it on another, the webmaster of the site, immediately threatens him with copyright infringement. How, if the interview is from another piece of media all together, and the webmaster is not the originator of the interview, nor is he a part of the actual interview. How is that infringement? And can he copyright that interview if he does not "own" it?

You are right, he cannot copyright the interview, if someone else holds the copyright to it, or it is in the public domain.

What he can possibly claim copyright to, however, is the layout of the speech on his website, or the design of the page. If someone copied the entire page, layout and all, that might infringe on his copyrights; however, if someone just copied the text of the speech and put them on their own website in their own format, then that would not be infringement (assuming, of course, that the work is either public domain or used with permission).

A greyer area is if he has exerpts of the speech on his website, and not the whole speech. In that case, choosing which passages to exerpt might be considered creative enough to be copyrightable on its own -- again, he can't copyright the public-domain speech as a whole, and he can't copyright the words in the exerpt, but he might have some claim to the exerpts themselves -- but like I said, this is kind of a grey area.