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Thanks, Marshall,

I'm waiting the unfolding of your surprise with bated breath. (Fishermen might wait for it with baited breath :) )

As for copyright infringement, here's some useful advice for everyone. A published piece of original writing has an inherent copyright, even if the author hasn't filed for it. If memory serves, it lasts for 75 years after the author's death. (Talk about "deathless prose"!)

If I filed a copyright on every review I've written, it would cost too much money and require too much trouble. But if I wanted to sue for infringement, I'd have a stronger case if I had filed for a formal copyright.

As a general principle, if you want to quote from anything you see on the web, you need to follow the principles of fair use, regardless of whether there is a copyright notice.

There are explicit guidelines as to how much of a piece you can quote and still call it fair use, and they are not easily summarized for all cases. But most people can apply common sense and get it mostly right.

For a poem, the limits on fair use are quite tight, even if that poem is part of a larger work. Quoting a whole poem requires permission.

A helpful story: In Beyond Jupiter: The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel, my manuscript quoted four lines from a Grateful Dead song that were particularly relevant to Heidi's approach to life. The publisher reduced it to two lines, which made it fair use. Had we kept all four lines, the permissions fee would have been beyond what we could justify.

In this case, it behooves me to make my copyright notice more prominent, but the inherent copyright offers me some small amount of protection nonetheless.

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)