The point, which must not be lost, is the Greene Co. Hist Society does not have the right (via copyright) to claim ownership of transcribed material that Michael Brown placed on the web and the rest of us worked to update/correct/amend. The listing was a simple spreadsheet of the deceased, the cemetery name and, on occasion, a note (e.g. family relationship). Under U.S. copyright law, none of this simplistic material can be claimed as proprietary or provincial. The Greene Co. Hist Society should do the honorable thing and return the material to the the web site since this was just a terrible misunderstanding which, if perpetuated, will injure the contributors, the users and the web site. Doug Park walloon@mailbag.com wrote: > "But other protections (arrangement, style, content, etc) can expand the scope of claim. Otherwise, many people who gather information of all types would not bother to do so unless they felt their work had some form of protection." > > Whether people *feel* their work has some form of protection, and whether their work actually *does* have some form of protection -- are two different matters. > > It is hard to imagine an arrangement of a cemetery transcription that would constitute creative, and hence copyrightable, material. Alphabetical or geographical order certainly are not sufficiently creative to qualify. Certainly, if the author chose to describe the cemetery, or individual portions of it, or took photographs of the cemetery, those things would be copyrightable. > > My intention of bringing up this point of intellectual property law is to ask whether the County Historical Society was within its legal right to do what was done. I speak as someone who has done his own share of transcribing or indexing original documents for genealogy publication. My personal feeling is that I could not care less if others used my work. That was the whole point of my doing the transcription, that as many people as possible use the results. It wasn't to get credit.