CompuServe Messages

Actually, David (at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon), your comment about "copyrighting the words but not the novel" is right on the money with regard to the copyright law, which states that the *expression* of an idea (the words, in the case of the novel) is covered, but the idea itself cannot be copyrighted. Just look at any of the genre's of fiction, and you'll see this in play – all the romances, or detective novels, or SF novels, that are really just re-writes of old stories in a new way. In the CO, one of the attorneys made the point that while you could copyright a picture of, for example, the skyline of Atlanta, you couldn't copyright the skyline itself. Nor could you prevent another person from selling an identically framed photo taken standing in the same spot, with an identical camera and film, on an identical day with identical sky conditions at the same time of day.