: Is it legal to share an index you made from someone else's book? There are some books published without a back-of-book index, which I feel is a dreadful shame. As part of my research I decided

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has anyone seen a similar situation which helps shed light on this grey area?

I have in front of me two publications: Common LISP: The Language, by Guy Steele (et al.) and published by Digital Press, and Common LISP: The Index, by Rosemary Simpson and published by Coral Software Corp and Franz Inc. Both were published in the US in the 1980s. I was fairly active in the LISP community at the time and I didn't hear a ruckus about that index — just cheering.

It is possible that the two publishers cooperated (the cover design of the index is clearly derived from the original book), but I don't know. There is no acknowledgment section in the index.

Since the index doesn't reuse content from the original I don't see how it could infringe. I offer this one example where somebody did exactly that without apparent repercussions.

Is it legal?

I am not a lawyer and you should consult one rather than just trusting people on the Internet. That said, another answerer argues that an index infringes copyright because it is "an exact duplicate of single words from another work", and I dispute that claim.

Words cannot be copyrighted. Even book titles cannot be copyrighted, as demonstrated by the number of duplicate and mostly-overlapping titles out there, so surely single words cannot be. (If you invented the word you might be able to pursue a trademark, but that's different. And rare, within the domain of things you might want to put into an index.) Using words like "iterator" and "class" and "inheritance" in an index does not infringe the rights of the person who wrote the programming book you're indexing; if it did, then using those words in contexts other than an index would also infringe, yet we see many many books on the same topics and no record of the person who got there first successfully suing the others. Conclusion: either this is legal or there is a vast untapped market of prospective, successful lawsuits that lawyers have routinely ignored. Which do you think more likely?

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If your index doesn't contain any of the original work's text, I fail to see how it could be considered copyright infringement. Since it can't be used without the original text, it's not infringing on the author's ability to make a living off their work. Possibly even the contrary.

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