🚀 go-pugleaf

Adam Hodgkin asks about commercial publishing of electronic bibliographies.
Before forming an opinion on this, I'd like to explore copyright issues a
bit.  In most cases, a bibliography (as opposed to an online database) is
only useful to me if I may copy large pieces of it into works I produce.  I
would not be interested in a commercial bibliography that did not allow such
use.

A fortiori, it would be difficult at the level of an individual bibliography
entry to determine whether I had created it myself from publication data and
a style guide, or whether it was copied from the commercial bibliography that
I just happen to own.  What do I do if the publisher sues me?

Note that although the alphabetization in phone books does not in the US
constitute sufficient value added to warrant copyright, the formatting of
bibliography entries probably would.