[Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

Sun Feb 1 01:00:01 UTC 2004

Evan Prodromou wrote:
>>>>>> "AT" == Alex T <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>   AT> This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If
>   AT> the content is so generic as just to be knowledge then it is
>   AT> not really copyrightable as it would fall in the public
>   AT> domain.
>
>That's absolutely 100% not true. Copyright is on expression of facts,
>not facts themselves. 
>
>You need to read up on [[:en:copyright]], bub.

Well IANAL either but I share your dislike for Alex's statement even though I highly respect Alex.
But to insinuate that NPOV articles are not creative works is *highly* insulting and also smacks
of academic hypothesizing about *possible* extensions to current copyright law that, frankly, will
never be accepted unless the Supreme Court of the U.S. goes completely nuts. Congress certainly
would never enact such a law due to the reference material and news lobbies (who claim to be
neutral, and often are in many cases - even if we are better at it). The public good would not be
served by encouraging bias in reference works and news reporting. 

The selection of what material to have in an article, its formatting, organization and
presentation, are all creative aspects that are protected by copyright law. The example of a
single sentence not being copyrightable is correct (except in rare circumstances, such as short
poems) but cannot be extended to the whole work (unless that work is just a list organized in a
non-creative way - but even then the *selection* of what to include may be creative). 

So this whole thing is just an academic 'what if' that has little to do with the real world. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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