This will, *I hope*, be my last message on this topic! You have to give me credit for promoting activity on this list. First, I have the greatest respect for copyright law and try to observe it. Second, I now understand the difference between license and copyright, but I have some concerns. If large companies make public domain works available on the Internet but severely limit their use, I am not sure how helpful that is. I found HeritageQuest's user agreement vague, as previously discussed. I think that Ancestry's is much better: http://www.ancestry.com/legal/Terms.aspx Third, I am particularly concerned about restrictions on the transcribing of government documents in the public domain. I am not talking about republishing or reselling images but rather transcribing from them. It seems to me that restricting the right to transcribe documents such as census records, no matter how enhanced the images are, circumvents the government's intent that they be in the public domain. If tomorrow I should decide to bring out a line of large-print books for the visually impaired and republish books that are copyrighted, I don't believe that I could use the defense that I had improved their readability. I realize that print is not the same as digital images, and I don't have sufficient knowledge to address what rights should adhere to enhanced images; but I think to maintain that you cannot freely transcribe them and do as you wish with the transcription is ridiculous. Fourth, as for the account that originally prompted this query, I have found it on a California website and will just link to it if I decide to use it at all. Finally, no, we are not lawyers, and I suspect that we subscribe to this list because we are primarily hobbyists who cannot justify the expense of consulting a lawyer, and a highly specialized one at that. Although my husband is a lawyer, his specialty is consumer law; like most lawyers he knows little about copyright and less about licensing. Sara Binkley Tarpley