At 09:52 AM 12/24/99, William Penington wrote: >I suppose the libraries are breaking the law by having the copy >machines there. Why, because what is there to copy in libraries but >copyrighted works Sue already stated that she did not intend to >distribute the material. Your splitting hairs here. As one who's made his living from copyright for more than 50 years now (I'm a writer) I agree that there's hair-splitting here, but I don't think it's the same hair you seem to have in mind. I don't know of any library at which the librarian will make your copies for you. The exception in the law is for _personal_ use of the copy, so you must make your own copies. THAT, I believe, is the hair in question. When it comes to scanning in copyrighted material and sending it to a relative, that's on the same level as the librarian making your copies, and so is technically illegal. Nevertheless I don't think the spirit of the law is being violated when I make a copy for someone else, or ask someone else to make a copy of some small part of a work for me. In fact, the legalese that Broderbund puts onto their World Family Tree CDs directly addresses the point, and authorizes the licensee to make a _limited_ copy for transmission to an individual for non-commercial purposes, while prohibiting mass copying or commercial use of the data! Seems to me that a similar disclaimer could be applied to most all of our copyrighted data, thus preventing many future problems. Of course, that cannot solve the problems already present. However it seems to me that the copyright owner (which is, I presume, the PRA) has the legal right to post the already published information on web pages, with restricted access, and put such a license on the use of those pages. The success of subscription organizations such as ancestry.com and others indicates that such an approach might well be self sustaining! --jk-- mailto:[email protected] Visit me at http://www.jimkyle.com