[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Fri Nov 11 02:09:51 UTC 2005

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> IIRC , someone had written to PG on this and they didn't seem to be 
>> worried about this.
>
> I wrote to Michael Hart and didn't get any reply at all.  If I had, I 
> would have posted it.  

Thanks for clarifying this.  I believe that he commented on this 
somewhere, even if not to us.

> I poked around Distrubited Proofreaders and generally speaking it 
> appears as though the rest of the volumes for the Encyclopaedia 
> Britannica are going to be using the original trademark to describe 
> the contents of the e-book.  In that regard PG doesn't seem too 
> worried about the trademark issues.  If the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
> Inc. wants to go after the Wikimedia Foundation and myself as an 
> editor who helped with the creation of the project on Wikisource, I 
> say bring it on!  Dropping a note on slashdot and a few other tech 
> news sites is going to make Brittanica Inc. wish they had gone to Mars 
> instead for the negative publicity it would generate.  Besides, they 
> havn't asked or demanded anything either, and this project has been 
> going for several months now, and widespread links through other 
> projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary.  We also have a formal 
> disclaimer that acknowledges the source of the trademark, and even a 
> hyperlink to the company website if anybody is really interested.  
> That  with a higher Google ranking alone ought to be worth something 
> to Britannica, Inc. 

The fact that EB has not commented on this at all is the important one.  
Until they do we can only speculate about what they think.  They have 
apparently not taken offense to the others who have referenced their 
name so it is also conceivable that the doctrine of laches may apply as 
wel if they do in the future.

We do have some people who like to guess what the law is, and then 
proceed to interpret it to their disadvantage.

> Wikisource is using the EB abbriviation mainly because typing out 
> Encyclopaedia Britannica as a namespace is a pain to use all of the 
> time and consumes server space and bandwidth.  It is easier to type 
> EB1911 than 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The ae ligature is 
> especially nasty to type in from an English language keyboard.)  I'm 
> sorry if I didn't make that clear somewhere on Wikisource earlier.  It 
> was certainly not done to avoid trademark usage although that was 
> another motive of minor concern, not the primary issue.  There are a 
> bunch of templates, Wikisource project organization pages, categories, 
> and more that were added that some very simple namespace had to be 
> created to coordinate all of those pages and keep from making 
> ambiguous references to elsewhere on Wikisource. 

I would have shortened it to simply "EB11" since it is also the 11th 
edition.  Since the reference needs to be in all relevant titles to 
distinguish them from other articles on the same topic it is better that 
it be as short as possible. 

Ec