Copyright of MS Office Help

[mairsa]

I hope someone can help me with this issue, since it is a legal one.

I am creating some learning guides for Office 2007 products to be used for
secondary and tertiary education and I was wondering what the copyright
status of Office Help is.

I presume it is owned by Microsoft Corporation, but I could not find any
further reference on whether some fragments of it may be quoted for
educational purposes or not. And if this is possible, what would be the
trademark notice or copiright attribution statment required?.

Thanks in advance

 

[macropod]

Hi mairsa,

Copyright laws vary from country to country - and you don't say where you are. I'd suggest contacting your national/regional
Microsoft office, or someone versed in your country's copyright laws.

 

[DL]

As a generalisation, a generic copyright statement might be in order.
I would have thought using fragments of 'help' is unlikely to be any breech
since most help instructions are freely available from many public sources,
and there arent many different methods of describing a particular help
process.

 

[mairsa]

Thanks very much for the answers. Now I have a better grasp of the situation.

Cheers

 

[Beth Melton]

I hope someone can help me with this issue, since it is a legal one.

I am creating some learning guides for Office 2007 products to be used for
secondary and tertiary education and I was wondering what the copyright
status of Office Help is.

I presume it is owned by Microsoft Corporation, but I could not find any
further reference on whether some fragments of it may be quoted for
educational purposes or not. And if this is possible, what would be the
trademark notice or copiright attribution statment required?.

Thanks in advance

This might help:
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.mspx#E4B
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Melton
What is a Microsoft MVP? http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpfaqs

Guides for the Office 2007 Interface:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/HA102295841033.aspx