Branden writes: > _Matthew Bender and Hyperlaw v. West_ and _Feist Publications, > Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co._ would indicate "no" (in the > United States), but I don't think there's anything *squarely* on > point.
I'm not sure who Hyperlaw is but I'm familiar with West. As I recall, there was a case where one company took West's publications and sent them to another country where they employed many people to type-in West's documents which was found perfectly legal (the legal documents themselves could not be copyrighted but West's hold on the documents is that they created them). Like I said, I typed these in by hand. > I would say go ahead. If no one can reasonably tell what work > you're "infringing", that's a good case for either 1) > copyrightability by you or 2) uncopyrightability of the work > altogether. > > In the former case, if you apply a DFSG-free license to the work, > then you're just fine for Debian main. I consider it public domain anyway so naturally that's how its going to be released. Thank you everyone for your feedback. Elizabeth
