Here is a suggested copyright warning that has been offered to me by an attorney.

"Permission to disclose the enclosed information is granted...provided references to the catalog listings published herein be referred to as “Black’s Numbers”. Permission is not granted for commercial use of "Black's #'s or to photocopy or electronically transmit or reproduce actual catalog pages without the specific written permission of the author."

Question: How effective do you think this caveat would be to discourage companies such as ICG from using Black's Numbers for commercial purposes on Atlantic City slabbed chips? BTW: I each year I do send in the copyright fee to register each issue of my catalog with the Library of Congress in Washington. My copyright warning is not simply printed on the cover of the catalog for effect. I do take the trouble to do the paperwork each year.

One of the problems that I see is that the numbers ICG has been using on the slabs I had the opportunity to view last weekend at Rene's Palace Station chip show in Vegas was that the slab itself didn't state that the number in the upper right hand corner was the TCR number, but simply had a number that just happened to coincide with the TCR number for that particular chip. In other words, the number displayed did not have a prefix of "TCR". One had to refer to their promotional hand-out sheet to see that it was in fact the TCR number printed inside the slab.