For the past six weeks or so, I have been doing a lot of research as I write a webpage about the forts in the city of Albany. I have been using various sources, one of them being Google Books. The title of one of them is "The History of the City of Albany, New York, From the Discovery of the Great River in 1524, by Verrazzano, to the Present Time", by Arthur James Weise (pub. 1884, Albany). The book is in the public domain because it was published before 1923; there is copyright restriction on the book. In fact, Google Books allowed me to download images of the entire book. Or, I could download a text file that had been created by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. The text file contains some mistakes, and the maps that interest me are not available that way. I am using Adobe Reader 9 on an XP computer to view the images of the book's pages, but I am not allowed to copy and paste any text or a single page that includes a map or photo. I suspect that it is Google that is not allowing me to do the copying. Besides copyright, there is another legal restriction. Before allowing you to view or download something, a website may make you agree not to copy any of it. If you agree, that is a legal contract. However, Google Books has no such binding contract that I could find. If you know how to legally get around this restriction on copying entire pages or text from a Google Book, please contact me privately. Cliff