Fair use applies to the use of material that is itself copyrightable. It turns out that much of the work in our field that carries a copyright mark is not actually covered by the copyright. This issue has been the subject of many long and interesting debates on various boards over the years, because of the field we're in. Copyrights can only apply to original work. It never applies to lists of facts. Simply put, if you walk a cemetery and transcribe and photograph every grave in the cemetery and then publish that material in a copyrighted book, the copyright will apply to the photographs (original work). It does not apply to the transcriptions of the graves. Those are not original works, simply the copying and dissemination of facts. If you write commentary or stories about your ancestors, it is original work and therefore copyrighted. If you do data analysis on the names, birth or death dates of the people in the cemetery, that's original and covered. The transcription itself (names, dates, and location of graves) is not, no matter how much work went into the compilation of those facts. It's simply not original work. Keith Winkelman, IBSSG -----Original Message----- From: Ken Reeder [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 11:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [MOBUCHAN] A view on copyrighted material Ref: "You can't put it on the net unless you go walk the cemetery yourself. The work is copyrighted." The Fair Use Doctrine allows the use of portions of most any copyrighted article. The writer of the above statement was correct that the copyrighted book could not be reproduced on the Internet without the authors written permission. But he/she has a very narrow view of the copyright law. The Fair Use Doctrine usually permits extraction of bits and pieces of a work, whether for critical review, or for educational purposes, and other uses. Under this Doctrine, the owner of this book could, if they chose to, do look-ups of information found in the book, and share it with the world. Personally, I would have a problem with someone doing this sharing of a copyrighted item, for profit. Were I the owner of the copyrighted item, I would welcome the publicity generated by the mention of the name of my book by those lookups, because sales would be generated. The following URL is a legal resource, one of many, that addresses this issue. http://www.bambooweb.com/articles/f/a/Fair_use.html ==== MOBUCHAN Mailing List ==== Buchanan County Genealogical Resources - Rootsweb http://resources.rootsweb.com/USA/MO/Buchanan/ ============================== Gain access to over two billion names including the new Immigration Collection with an Ancestry.com free trial. Click to learn more. http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=4930&sourceid=1237