At 12:39 AM 11/13/98 -0800, Rick Gordon wrote:

>Anyway, a few months later I got a "cease and desist" notice from them.

>Polite but firm if you know what I mean. Now, I thought that simple

>compilations of items such as this particular list of Bulletins wasn't a

>copyrightable entity, but I didn't feel like arguing with them about it so

>I took it down, plus I removed all the "free" links to their site, plus

>they annoyed me enough that I'm sending this out to all of you now!

It depends upon what value they added to Volkswagen's own published list. The copyright office is VERY specific about this: if you take information available in the public-domain (e.g. the census, or stock quotes) and repurpose it (even if it has been designed in a unique way), you still have NO COPYRIGHT as you haven't added anything of value to the publicly-available data.

So, the real question is: is the list of bulletins in the public-domain or is it copyrighted by Volkswagen? If it is, then AllData may be under a contractual obligation to prevent its dissemination.

Cheers,

<bold>Michael J. Sullivan

</bold><italic>Director of Catalog Design

Open Market, Inc.

</italic>

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