[WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

Wed Mar 3 02:10:55 UTC 2004

user_Jamesday wrote:
> At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#Marc
h_2 .
>
> A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of
articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.

See the decision of the US Supreme Court in [[Feist v. Rural]], 1991.
(Thanks to Raul654 to pointing out our article on it) It's directly
connected to this.

It's worth noting that we're not even listing their entire set of titles-
only the difference between us and them. This could be considered
comparative advertising- see Sony v. Bleem (9th Circuit Court of Appeals,
2000) for a recent case in which fair use was upheld for what many called an
edge case.

Also, nearly all the redirects created are obvious- <lastname>, <firstname>
naming, different formulations of titles, transliteration of foreign
characters (a-ring to double-a, c-cedilla to c, accent marks, tildes), and
so forth. The more esoteric Biblical names, mentioned earlier, all come from
texts or translations that are within the public domain (typically via
Easton's). Moreover, the suggestion on the discussion page that we should
also delete all the redirects created as a result is ludicrous.

Based on all of these and a number of other factors (our nonprofit status
among them, but that's relatively minor), I'd say we're well within bounds.
[[meta:Avoid Copyright Paranoia]], people.

-- Jake

PS: IANAL. I miss Alex.