This is wonderful! In general, nothing published by the U.S. government can be copyrighted. This is as it should be, of course. We paid for them to write it, after all. This may be true for other governments as well, which might help the non-English wikipedias. But please let's research it carefully. You also have to watch out... the White House website has (or did have, during the Clinton administration, I don't know if Dubya's staff has revamped) a biography of every President. But they used those biographies with permission from a copyrighted source. Therefore, you can't automatically assume that anything on a U.S. government website is fair game. Most of it is, though. Timothy Shell wrote: -- ************************************************* * http://www.nupedia.com/ * * The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia * *************************************************

My understanding is that, by either law or custom, the United States government doesn't copyright anything that it publishes. I *know* this means that there is no U.S. copyright. I *think* this means that there is no copyright *period*. On the one hand, all of the wikipedia sites are physically located here in the U.S. on servers owned by me and operated by me in the U.S. So U.S. law is what applies. If any other country gets mad at me for some reason, I don't suppose I care very much. But on the other hand, the intention of the free licensing is that anyone who is somehow unhappy with the way a wikipedia is being run can take the content and reuse it in their own way -- and to make sure that they can do so easily, we should try to be sure that everything in the wikipedia system is as unencumbered as possible. Rybo wrote: -- ************************************************* * http://www.nupedia.com/ * * The Ever Expanding Free Encyclopedia * *************************************************