As for copyright I have been thought this issue before and with a lawyer. If you publish something be it on the web or in a book, it does not have to have a copyright announcement to still be considered copyrighted. You can go to the government and get it "officially" copyrighted, but it is not necessary (it is advisable). If you don't it is your burden to prove you published it first and that is not always easy. Information like a translated census record or even a Pleve chart gets its information from an original source (Russian Owned Records). Those Russian owned records are the property of the Russian government. If you take a copy of them and translate them into English and spend hours compiling them for a "book", then you own the compilation but not the information itself. In other words someone else can get the original records and translate and compile their own book. It's sort of like taking a picture of the statue of liberty. You frame it and sell it. Someone else stands in the same exact spot and with the same setting on their camera takes the same photo (assuming nothing changes in the photo) and frames it and sells it. You can't do anything about it. It's not your statue. If they use your photo and sell it, then you have a legal claim, but try to prove it. Pleve charts are very interesting in the respect he does not "copyright" them and he is clearly selling them to the buyer with no anticipation of publishing them again. That would lend me to believe he is giving the rights up to the buyer. It is not clear who owns the rights to them, but remember the information on them is the Russian governments and can be reproduced. It is unfortunate others will try to "gain" from your hard work. Hundreds of hours go into some of these projects and everyone should respect that. Believe me after paying hundreds of dollars to get a copy of a census and hundreds of dollars to translate it then hundreds and hundreds of hours of compiling the information, you begin to feel like the information is yours and you sometimes don't want to "let go" of it. With respect to genealogy, the act of sharing is very hard to do for some. People are just after the recognition of the hard work they have done. To see someone else using that hard work and not giving credit to them is very upsetting. Please be kind and respectful to each other. Both directions! If no one shared, what would you have right now? The best way to respect that is to share it and respect others hard work. DB