Joe wrote: It depends, copyright law now extends to something like 60 years past the author's death, and of course corporations never _die_, they are bought up by others who abandon the product and deny that it ever existed -- witness VisiCalc by Personal Software renamed VisiCorp then buried by Lotus when they bought VisiCorp, nowadays Lotus is owned by IBM (makers of my beloved RS/6000 line) and who knows whether or not IBM will pursue a copyright violation there?, since the machines that ran VisiCalc are (mostly) long dead. Case law seems to be vague and/or variable -- since when the copyright laws were last (poorly, from the point of view of a libertarian) rewritten, software for anybody except large businesses or governments was not a factor. My personal opinion is to copy the stuff and wait for the writer to object -- copyright applies to the creator of the product and used to end at death -- the families of politicians who'd written memoirs caused the first extension of the time limit, it being a time when politician weren't automatically rich when elected. -- Ward Griffiths They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else. Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_