I think I just addressed this in another posting before I even saw this one, but Larry hit the key word in his response to Richard which was "LEGALLY" It most certainly depends on where Richard copied the data FROM as to whether it can be placed online or not. If it is from a copyrighted publication we can't put it online without the permission of the person or group owning the copyright. If it is from a very old book on which the copyright has expired (and this gets touchy because of changes made over the years in copyright laws) the perhaps it can be placed online. As the listowner and the Henry County site owner, I really have to "tiptoe" on these things to make sure they can be used without violating copyright. Here's an example: Two people send me a list of burials from the same cemetery--lets use Old Kewanee as a good example. The first one says "I copied these out of a book at the library published by the Genealogical Society" The second one says "My sister and I went out and walked the cemetery and wrote down all the information on the stones on July 27th 2000" Now, both of them have sent me the burials from the same cemetery--it MIGHT be exactly the same if both people looking at the stones saw exactly the same thing BUT we could not use the information copied from the book unless the GS told us "Yes, you can publish our book on your website" (and just why would they want to do that--then nobody would buy it, the society would have no funding and they wouldn't be able to publish more books to help us and to keep the society running) The 2nd list we COULD use because that data was written BY the submitter, who buy submitting it has given us permission to USE it. These individuals who walked it don't want to make any money off it. The data on the stones is public domain (thus can be shared freely) but the COMPILATION of ALL THE STONES, style, etc, is NOT public domain. BUT then you have the "moral" delemma...since the genalogical society HAS published this information. Do we want to "cut the throat" of the GS who has been very generous with sharing with us by posting the data free and killing their fundrasing effort? It's a very complicated matter....but legally, no we can't take data from books which are still under copyright and put it on the website. > Subject: Re: [ILHENRY-L] birth, and marriage indexes > From: "Larry Peterson" <[email protected]> > > I think that any information that can legally be posted would be beneficial > to the site and those that visit it. Is it possible to have too much > information available? > > > From: "Richard L Dalton" <[email protected]> > Subject: [ILHENRY-L] birth, and marriage indexes > > > hi henry county researchers > > > > awhile back when i was doing searches for my family lines i copied a few > pages of the birth and marriage indexes for henry county, il. > > > > would it be helpful to transcribe and post them to the list? i don't > think these are on-line anywhere. > > > > i imagine several of us have found these books in various libraries and > copied pertinent pages and if we all transcribed what we had to the list we > may be able to post it the GenWEb Henry Co site???????????????? > > > > any thoughts > > > > richard l dalton > > [email protected] > >