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

["Tom Johnson" <lists -at- idratherbewriting -dot- com>]

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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