Is creating an index for a book an infringement of the author's copyright?

The question in the subject line is very general but I am going to explain my real situation in more details.

I purchased a book titled "The Old Testament Sabbath" by Niels-Erik A. Andreasen from a bookstore in Maryland and it arrived at my home last Monday. Though this book is out-of-print, I was able to locate it via Internet. The book, unfortunately, does not have an index, although it has a list of references in the back.

The book is very scholarly and I believe I will refer to it many times in the future. To help me to locate any note in the book, I would like very much to create an index for the book. Also, I would like very much to put the index on my web page, so that others can copy it for their research. I also plan to put the entirety of the index in the public domain (at least for the U.S.).

The book is copyrighted by The Society of Biblical Literature in the year of 1972.

My specific questions are: If I create an index for the book, will I infringe The Society of Biblical Literature's copyright? Can I put the index in the public domain without infringing their copyright? Finally, will I infringe their copyright if I copy the index to my web page for others to access and copy it?

Keep in mind that I do not and will not copy any phrase from the book for the index. I will limit the entries for the index to proper nouns, unusual common nouns, individuals' names, verses, foreign nouns, place names, dates, and titles of other articles and books.

I do not want to apply the Fair Use doctrine to my situation because I want to put the index in the public domain and the Fair Use doctrine is meaningless in this case.

One last question, do you know of any court decisions that will shed any light on my situation?

Thanks for your time.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Wed Mar 04 1998 - 23:45:13 GMT