On Wednesday, November 1, 2000, Bennie White <[email protected]> wrote: > As far as using the data in copyrighted public record compilations, > no problem! It would be, however, a copyright violation if someone > downloaded the entire file or zeroxed a copy and posted it in a public > place, such as a web page. Now we have a format violation. But if they downloaded someone else's formatted text file and displayed some or all of the data in a different format...no copyright violation. The particular medium used (paper, electronic text, photograph, GIF, etc.) is not a format. For that reason, companies who provide such transcriptions often use licensing to control access (e.g. Lexus/Nexus), or use techniques to prevent access to wholesale chunks of the data (e.g. Ancestry.com). It would, however, be unethical IMHO to not acknowledge the source of the data if you didn't get it from original records (not to mention a good idea in case your actual source got something wrong). S R C A cott obert ranston nderson [email protected]