"W. David Samuelsen" wrote: > And as for the format - they have to be in an arrangement not found > elsewhere. Only AIS used this particular format since 1970. If > you will look in Precision Indexing's (the rival) you will discover > their format is different and unique as well. On Thursday, November 23, 2000, Cliff Lamere <[email protected]> wrote: > The 1991 U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Feist vs. Rural says this: > "Originality does not signify novelty; a work may be original even though it > closely resembles other works, so long as the similarity is fortuitous, not > the result of copying. To illustrate, [499 U.S. 340, 346] assume that two > poets, each ignorant of the other, compose identical poems. Neither work is > novel, yet both are original and, hence, copyrightable." > > So, with a compilation such as baptism or marriage records, the format > choices are definitely limited. If a person went out of their way to > develop some sort of difference, another person could imagine the same > format. Then, identical formatting of identical records could apparently > produce two valid copyrights. > > Did I err? No, you are correct. But there's a technique that helps to shed light on whether the format is independently original, and that is what is described here: "W. David Samuelsen" wrote: > classic copyright matter - in case you don't know what the markers > are. They're the altered entries different from what's in original > censuses ... So if you claim you came up with the format independently, but the other copyrighter's "false data" shows up in your "independent" work, that's a pretty good sign that you were actually copying theirs. One other aspect of this, unrelated to censuses: some formats are "public domain", having been used for a long, long time and being very widespread. For example, placing name, birth, and death data into a pedigree tree or descendancy tree doesn't gain one a copyright. Someone might claim an "independent" creation of this format, but I think it would be hard to prove. S R C A cott obert ranston nderson [email protected]