On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 11:50:58PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote: I'm afraid that's not necesarily true. Most classical "texts" have survived as many-times-copied manuscripts mouldering away in libraries. Suppose "Euclid's Geometry" is available to us as four manuscripts, one of which is partial. Each of these is based on former copies that have not survived. Each copy was made by hand, an error-prone process, from an older copy with copying errors of its own. The result is that each surviving manucript has a few dozen words that are different, and some are missing entire passages. Which is the closest to the original? None is particilarly close. So a good modern edition of "Euclid's Geometry" is based on a study of all available manuscripts, which the editor has used to correct each other, given certain assumptions about what the likely errors are. This sort of extensive editing would certainly create a new edition and therefore a new copyright under US law. -- Henry House The attached file is a digital signature. See <http://romana.hajhouse.org/pgp> for information. My OpenPGP key: <http://romana.hajhouse.org/hajhouse.asc>.