Ethics of reusing vendor's help material -- copyright issue or commonplace practice?

Subject: Ethics of reusing vendor's help material -- copyright issue or commonplace practice?
From: "Tom Johnson" <lists -at- idratherbewriting -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 06:57:44 -0400

Is it commonplace or questionable to reuse a vendor's help material nearly verbatim to customize a smaller guide more focused on our audience?

For example, our company recently purchased software that comes with a 384 page user guide. Our users will only need about 40 pages of this. I want to copy these 40 pages, change it a little to fit with our style guide, and brand it without own documentation template. However, I plan to leave the wording and screenshots mostly as is.

If we've purchased this software, is it still a copyright issue? Even if so, is it common practice in the tech comm. field to do this? Any recommendations for me?

Thanks,

Tom

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References:
Re: Crazy situation: Customer responsible for translation: From: John Posada

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