The following is a very basic expample.

Say I wrote a book in 1850 and copyrighted it. Years passed and I renewed the copyright until 1900. The rule of thumb is that a copyright expires after 75years more or less..(You can google copyrights and check the actual wording)

If someone now copied this expired copyrighted material, there wouldn't be a problem.

But lets say you, found this book and decided to rewrite it. You now own the copyright. If someone else copies the re-written material, no matter how much it matches the original non-copyrighted work, that person would be in violation of your copyrighted material.


There are also catches to items listed as Free, Free to use, Royalty Free and on and on. We could spend hours listing all the hazards of copyrighted material. Must of this kind of stuff either has copyrights, free to use for personal use only, Non-commerical use, or charges a fee for use. In other cases, they can attach a number of Creative Commons licenses.

Anyway...I wrote too much already...Good luck with your hunt