On Tuesday, November 28, 2000, Libbie Griffin <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm currently working on a compilation of early tax lists for a particular > county. Included are recently discovered documents and long-known, > never-published lists. Let me try out several scenarios and ask your > opinions. > > 1. I simply publish typeset copies of the extant lists. This will take > several hundred pages and include several indexes. Included are a > complicated slave index that is particularly unique to this publication. > Is it protected by copyright laws? I assume that by "[simple] typeset copies of the extant lists", there is no reformatting. In that case, those portions of your book are not copyrighted. But if you take the information from the lists and express it in a different format that shows some creativity, you could claim copyright on that expression of the data. This would also describe any index you construct. In no case can the data itself be copyrighted. > 2. As above, but I add a detailed forward pertaining to the people who > lived in the county during the period as well as an explanation of tax > laws, county history & geography, etc. Is this "more protected"? The lists are still not copyrighted, though your forward would be. > 3. As above, plus I add notes pertaining to each family, drawing heavily > from county court records. This would purely be my own original > compilation. Does the annotation serve to make the entire project > copyright-able? Are my rights as the compiler better protected? I assume that the annotations would be written by you, rather than simple quotes from the court records. If you place such annotations on the same page as the original data, you will be making those sections of the page copyrighted; because of the nature of most copying technologies (i.e. oriented towards entire pages), you will be making it harder (but not impossible) for people to copy the non-copyrighted portions of the page. If the annotations are on separate pages, referenced in the simple lists by, e.g. numeric notes, I don't think that would be enough to make the simple lists copyrighted. The annotations certainly would be. Scott Anderson [email protected] http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/anderson