Re: Genealogy and copyrights

I could not agree with you more; I have been looped in on USGenWeb's attempts to write a policy on copyrights and am concerned that their proposals may have the effect of stifling legitimate genealogical research.

I think that the Feist Decision (I had not read it until your email) makes it clear to me that census indexes aren't copyrightable, period. The organization isn't any more original than a phone book. Probably same true for most indexes of public documents-abstracts might have slightly different considerations, but that still seems comparable to a phone book to me. But even if there is some copyright in some abstracts, surely amateur use of small portions of these works for personal family research is a fair use! So a page or two is copied; it is copied so that the information can be put in a different form, a family history, not so that numerous additional copies of the exact expression can be made.

Jett Hanna
Austin, TX
<jettplane[_at_]aol.com> Received on Tue Oct 29 1996 - 01:31:44 GMT