On 07/21/2013 07:55 PM, Amgine wrote:
If I recall correctly, under US copyright case law a
word's definition
cannot be copyrighted. There are only a limited set of ways to express
the definition of a term, and it is recognized this puts an undue burden
on new works.
However, a *collection* of terms may be copyrighted under the database
portion of the copyright rules.
(I have a dual role here, both as user:LA2 in Wiktionary and
as the founder of Project Runeberg, where that dictionary
was digitized.)
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right
"database rights" exist in the EU, but not in the U.S.
Such a bill was introduced, but rejected,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_protection_bill
When EU introduced the catalog protection in the mid 1990s,
they borrowed the concept from the Scandinavian countries,
which in the late 1950s jointly renewed their copyright
laws (Denmark 1958?, Sweden 1960, Norway 1961).
It was designed to give a short protection, 10 years after
the first publication, to a catalog, table or listing, hence
the name "catalog protection" (Danish: katalogbeskyttelse,
Swedish: katalogskydd). Later, this has been extended to
15 years, but it's still based on the year of publication, and
not the death year of the author.
The catalog is a collection of facts or short entries which
cannot be copyrighted each on their own. However, it is
not clear how long such an entry can be before it is
eligible for copyright.
In each case, we have (at least) two different issues to
discuss: 1) Are the individual entries copyrightable?
2) Is the entire collection protected by database rights?
The 2nd issue is the easiest: Database rights, where they
are applicable, only last for 15 years. So anything older
than 15 years is free from database rights.
The harder issue is whether individual entries are
copyrightable. Nobody gives a clear definition.
When digitizing books in Project Runeberg, I have made
the assumption that entries in spelling dictionaries, translation
dictionaries, and who-is-who books are not copyrightable.
Based on this assumption, I have digitized a large number
of such works from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark
which are older than 15 years but younger than 70 years.
This started three and a half year ago.
So far, nobody has protested. Since the publishers of these
works are still around, and I'm not trying to hide, they are
free to express their dissatisfaction, but they have not.
(My assumption does not extend to etymological dictionaries
where each entry is a little story in its own right. For such
dictionaries, I respect the common life+70 copyright.)
In practice, the who-is-who entries are never copied from
Project Runeberg to Wikipedia, but completely rewritten
in standard Wikipedia prose, using the digitized book as
a source reference, as in this case,
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Blix
The source reference is a 1977 who-is-who,
http://runeberg.org/vemardet/1977/0139.html
To reuse a scanned dictionary in Wiktionary, similar
transformations are needed.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature -
http://runeberg.org/