Fastfission wrote:
2. If so, however, our fair use claims are something
like:
C. Amount of work to be used: Minimum amount possible -- strictly
logical information, minus a lot of it which we have pruned away.
Given the wide but uneven range of Wikipedian interests, the remaining
lists would be so incoherent as to be useless to anybody but us.
3. Copyright law is, more than anything else, built
upon lawsuits and
the threat of lawsuits. It seems unlikely to me that EB would:
A. Care much about this
B. Think they had much of a case on this
C. Want to waste their resources finding out
D. Even consider this an issue if we didn't raise it with them first
In other words, don't scratch your tonsils with your toenails.
It does raise the question of whether Wikimedia has
their own lawyers
or not, though. If there was at least one person paid part-time to do
these sort of consultations, we wouldn't have to rely on
back-of-the-envelope approaches like this. Law is not something which
functions well by consensus of non-experts, obviously.
The consensus of experts is not much better. 50% of lawyers' cases are
lost. We have an endless stream of difficult copyright questions, and
not just in US law. Many of the issues that come up have not been
properly tested in the courts, so most legal opinions will be nothing
more than a best guess.
I don't think there's any easy answer with this
sort of thing
-- there never is with most copyright law questions. It'll always be
something in terms of "probabilities," and I think it is far enough on
the "likely not a problem" end of the scale to not worry about or see
any need to take down the page.
Yes. A lot of it is a matter of business sense, and of knowing when to
push an issue and how much. Knowing when to take risks.
Much of what happens in law is not a simple matter of the black and
white that is written in the statutes. Having black and white rules
gives an illusion of simplicity. Our 3RR rule seems simple and
straightforward, but the arguments about it are endless.
Ec