At 05:50 PM 10/16/99 EDT, [email protected] wrote: > Knowing that anything published before 1923 is >public domain, is it safe to assume that I can transcribe the actual records >in this book as long as I do not include the index Mr. Volkel typed for the >1980 reprint? In my opinion, yes, you can. I would not hesitate a bit. Mr. Volkel put a lot of effort, I am sure, into indexing the book. However, he doesn't own the copyright even to that. The copyright to the index is "Copyright 1980, McDowell Publications." It is evident that he either did the index "for hire" to McDowell Publications or McDowell Publications bought the copyright. The original text was out of copyright even in 1980. The publishers were aware of that fact when they published it. That's why they very specifically identified the index as having a different copyright. I see no reason to try to get an pre-1923 version of a book when the text will not differ one bit. Publishing public domain material does not give the publisher ANY exclusive rights to the material even in the copies that he has published. Once in the public domain, always in the public domain. http://www.rootsweb.com/~mikegoad/html/copyright5.htm Mike Goad