[WikiEN-l] Re: Copyright and Britannica Article List

Sat Jun 25 17:56:11 UTC 2005

Fastfission wrote:

>Tables of contents are, to my knowledge, generally considered easily
>and unquestionably covered by fair use clauses -- there is  no
>"creativity" that goes into simply compiling a list of what your
>encyclopedia has in it, and in the end this is essentially just
>citation information, which of course is never considered copyrighted
>(how could you attribute if you could not cite?). If one is to be
>copyright paranoid (something which I somewhat support in some
>circumstances), there are plenty of more dodgy uses of fair use in
>Wikipedia than this.
>  
>
If you want to claim fair use for this list, please review and analyze 
the fair use factors and tell us how this list qualifies for fair use. 
Fair use is analyzed on a case-by-case basis, so you can't really just 
say glibly that a particular type of content is always fair use. It's 
the *use* that matters much more than the nature of the original content.

There *is* creativity involved in a list of what an encyclopedia 
contains, quite specifically due to the selection process involved in 
determining what subjects go into the encyclopedia in the first place.

I agree that we have lots of dubious claims of fair use, but that 
doesn't make this one okay.

--Michael Snow