PE> You can get the telephone directory on CDROM.

Yes, and damned cheap now, cheaper even than the cost of floppys by
a long way.

PE> The White Pages says it is copyrighted.

Well, thats quite complicated. The short story is that if you want to
punch up all the data from the white pages they can whistle dixie for
all the control they have over that data.

PE> What I want to do is make the white pages for Sydney available for
PE> FREQ from my BBS as PHONEA.ZIP, PHONEB.ZIP etc etc.  Can I do this
PE> simply by copying files off one of the telephone CDROMs that is
PE> available?

And thats another can of worms. There is in fact copyright protection
for compilation of data which is itself not copyrighted. And they usually
play clever buggers with encrypting the data on the CDROM to make it hard.

Corse the other question is just what the legal status of lists which
you produce with a program of your own which uses the CDROM as a source
of the data. No doubt the legals will gleefully fight to your last dollar
over that one. They already have endlessly on the white pages themselves.

You do realise that the average CDROM of phone list is full, 650MB class ?
In fact some even use 2 CDs, those with the less efficient data storage.

--- PQWK202