Charlotte,

I don't think I mixed-in my personal analysis of the material I posted about
copyrights or included interpretations or personal commentary.  My few
statements of opinion were obvious and were posted in separate messages.  The
basic materials were quoted verbatim from current information given by the US
Copyright Office and other sources all of which were cited in each message.  The
overwhelming majority was directly from the Copyright Office.  If they have it
wrong, please tell them.  

The definitions for "compilation", "collected work", "derivative work", etc.,
were all straight from the Copyright Office web site which indicates the
definitions are current.  You can find their definitions at
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/title17/1-101.html which I showed in the message
you quoted.  I appreciate your comments, but until the Copyright Office changes
their information, I'm inclined to abide with their posted definitions and to
recommend others do likewise.

If you read what I posted, I don't believe you will find anywhere that I said
simple regurgitation of public domain material is copyrightable.  In fact, I've
posted republished public domain works online such as Ramsay's History, SC
Colonial Records, etc.

If we could just get all the Lawyers out of Congress, maybe we could get some
laws written that people could understand and comply with.  ;-)

Steve Coker


Char Coats-Siercks wrote:
> Steve...Feist is the US case on this and the West case just came down in
> May of 1998...the court cases dealing with this require something
> unique...just copying a phone book is not a violation of a
> copyright...and data bases are not covered by the new law that was
> passed...that paragraph was taken out...:(  Nor does the section you
> quote deal with public records....they are not original....nor is
> listing data from them original....you cannot copyright that which is
> already in the public domain...Charlotte

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