<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> Del, the phone book case I had in mind was about White Pages. I just looked it up again, it's Feist v Rural, 1991. In involved the phony numbers thing that you mention. There is a very good discussion of it in Wikipedia, which is useful because it sets out the principles and ideas behind US copyright law very well. You suggest that <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap=""> Company Y has to gather their own information independently of Company X's published list; then they are free to publish their own list based on the information they have gathered as the result of their own work. Even if the two end up being identical. </pre> </blockquote> Afraid not! The Feist V Rural case established just the very opposite: "The court ruled that Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved. The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed". I think that would apply to Pierce. Try it and see what happens in court! Best regards, David. </body> </html>