I'd like you to expand on this point a little more. Is the point you're making that sites like The Whitman Archive have no claim to copyright? That they shouldn't expect users to properly credit the Archive when they use it to cite a bit of Whitman's poetry that they found there? I'd like to see a distinction between (or a clarification of) the <em>legal</em> claim that a site like The Whitman Archive has to copyright its intellectual labor and the <em>ethical</em> claim that the Archive has to ask users to be honest in their scholarship, for example, that when they're citing a passage from the 1855 <em>Leaves of Grass</em> it's because they read the Folsom and Price electronic edition rather than the actual edition in a library's special collections. Does that make sense? I've always read the "Conditions of Use" page on The Whitman Archive as a request for ethical citation practices rather than as a legal claim to copyright, but that's probably because I'm not well versed in copyright law. Either way, I think there's a distinction to be drawn between the legalities of using the material on the Archive and the ethics of it.