We've created a doozy of a new site: SpellingCity.com .  Tonight, we got a call that one teacher feels another teacher "stole" her published list.  Yikes.  Do spelling lists have owners?  Is their ownership a copyright-type ownership or just a moral-type ownership.  I read great interest one view: (And I quote from http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/ipr.html )

What is a copyright? Copyrights are property: they can be sold, given away, or inherited. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 limits copyright to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression."

What is an original work? This is intentionally vague, and can ultimately only be decided in court. It is easiest to give examples of things that are not original: facts, like the population of Mexico City; ideas, like the idea of the internal combustion engine; systems; titles or short phrases. Things like morphological paradigms and word lists are not likely to be considered original. Things that are likely to be considered original works are poetry, prose (fiction or non-fiction), computer programs, artwork, songs, musical notation, a web page, architectural drawings, photographs, recordings of music and songs.

I've contacted the writer of that to see how he feels about me quoting it, whether he thinks he is an adequate authority (or had truly researched it), but still, that doesn't resolve all the IP issues around a site like spellingcity.com.

I did improve the copyright page removing some totally irrelevant bunk that the marketers and operatiosn people slipped in there such as: Time4Learning is used by children who also use A Beka , instead of Kumon, or who might have, in another era, used Hooked on Phonics.