Hi, Leroy- It is really best not to try to give copyright advice unless you are a copyright attorney. It is a very complex subject which is the reason I recommended the COPYRIGHT@rootsweb.com mailing list for in depth copyright discussion. Just giving another person "credit" does not absolve a person from infringing on a copyright. Also, you do not have be selling or profiting from the material to be infringing on someone's copyright. Joan In a message dated 6/17/2008 1:51:13 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, lmchemcons@earthlink.net writes: If you give credit to the source in your publication, you are actually giving them free advertising. **************Gas prices getting you down? Search AOL Autos for fuel-efficient used cars. (http://autos.aol.com/used?ncid=aolaut00050000000007)

Those of us who are printing up family histories are not publishing them in the legal sense. We are COMPILING them, and there is a difference. If you gather information from all kinds of sources and then put it all in one volume, and then print up copies of that volume and distribute it ... especially if you are only charging the cost of copying it ... you are not publishing it and you are not infringing on anyone's copyright. You are compiling information. It is a point of law that you can only copyright ORIGINAL information. If you are gathering information, then you are not infringing. In colleges, professors have to watch copyright restrictions if they are going to copy en mass text books because the text books are ORIGINAL material written by the authors. If we write an ORIGINAL manuscript about our ancestors ... in other words, telling a story in our own original and thought up words, we can copyright it. But if we are gathering public documents and distributing them, we are not infringing on a copyright and we cannot copyright it because it is not our own original effort to create those documents. As a courtesy, in my data, I include credits such as a person who emailed me information, or if I copy it from a book (especially if the book contains copies of public documents such as birth or death or marriage certificates) I note where it is available from. THAT is not infringing on anyone's copyright. It's a matter of law ... compilations are not copyrightable and are not infringements. If medical journals and pharmaceutical journals compile indexes or abstracts of articles, they are not infringing on anyones copyright. If we compile data on our ancestors we are not infringing on a copyright. ----- Original Message ----- From: JYoung6180@aol.com<mailto:JYoung6180@aol.com> To: paberks@rootsweb.com<mailto:paberks@rootsweb.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 11:57 AM Subject: Re: [PABERKS] Genealogy copywrite question Hi, Leroy- It is really best not to try to give copyright advice unless you are a copyright attorney. It is a very complex subject which is the reason I recommended the COPYRIGHT@rootsweb.com<mailto:COPYRIGHT@rootsweb.com> mailing list for in depth copyright discussion. Just giving another person "credit" does not absolve a person from infringing on a copyright. Also, you do not have be selling or profiting from the material to be infringing on someone's copyright. Joan In a message dated 6/17/2008 1:51:13 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, lmchemcons@earthlink.net<mailto:lmchemcons@earthlink.net> writes: If you give credit to the source in your publication, you are actually giving them free advertising. **************Gas prices getting you down? Search AOL Autos for fuel-efficient used cars. (http://autos.aol.com/used?ncid=aolaut00050000000007<http://autos.aol.com/used?ncid=aolaut00050000000007>) ==== PABERKS Mailing List ==== PABERKS@rootsweb.com<mailto:PABERKS@rootsweb.com> To contact the List Administrator: Rick Berkheiser, PABERKS-admin@rootsweb.com<mailto:PABERKS-admin@rootsweb.com> To visit the Berks Message Board: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec?htx=board&r=rw&p=localities.northam.usa.states.pennsylvania.counties.berks<http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec?htx=board&r=rw&p=localities.northam.usa.states.pennsylvania.counties.berks> To visit the Berks County, PA website: http://www.pa-roots.com/~berks/<http://www.pa-roots.com/~berks/> Hosted by Nancy Freehafer ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to PABERKS-request@rootsweb.com<mailto:PABERKS-request@rootsweb.com> with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message