On Wednesday, November 1, 2000, Cliff Lamere <[email protected]> wrote: > There is more than one method to copy records from a website. You can do a > Copy and Paste, or you can capture an image of the entire page. > > I don't know if a copyright violation occurs by simply capturing an image of > the page and transferring it to your computer. My guess is that there would > be, even if you then altered it to uncopyrighted form and applied your own > copyright. Someone else may want to comment on this point. Every time you look at a web page, you are making a copy of it to your computer screen, but also to your local hard disk (first, actually). But this is not only allowed but expected, an "implied consent" of the author by placing it on the web. It is similar to the broadcast of radio, television, etc. Copyright law then allows you to do other things with it for your own personal use such as research. This might include, for example, changing media (html -> electronic text file -- your "Copy and Paste" -- or printing on paper). So, I see no copyright violations here. > It is my impression that the html codes, graphics, tables, links, etc. are > lost during a regular Copy and Paste from a website. That removes a lot of > the "creative" aspects of the webpage. If you are copying public records, > the information in them cannot be copyrighted. A person's introduction or > comments can be, because they are the creative work of the person who posted > the records. If you Copy and Paste only the records and the source (book > title, etc.) of the records, you should not be in any violation. I would submit that taking a public record in (paper) table format and expressing it in (HTML) table format does not constitute a creative work. It is a pretty straightforward process, made even more cut-and-dried by certain tools (e.g. transcribe into Excel, copy and paste Excel into PageMill). But you are quite right that everything else added to the web page could be a creative work. > However, Arthur C.M. Kelly adds his own "Item" number for each record in the > 60+ books of NY vital records that he has published. His index sends you to > that number. This might show some creative effort. If his records were > online, you might not be able to use his column of item numbers. But, > since there is nothing creative about chronologically numbering records, it > would seem to me that you could use the same numbers without copyright > violation. I could be wrong. You certainly wouldn't want to call it an > "item" number, a word he chose because it contained only four letters, which > is the widest his columns go (He stopped at 9999 records in one narrow book > for that reason). His index would most certainly be copyrighted, without that the numbers are useless. If you generated your own index, I agree that you could use the same numbers if you chose to do so. But I don't think the terminology matters (unless he trademarked "item" in this context :-). S R C A cott obert ranston nderson [email protected]