Regarding purely factual data comprising a less than significant portion of a database - which is certainly true for all ISBNs in Googles database, where records are considerably largen than a single ISBN - there should be no legal problem copying them under German law, regardless of Googles contract, imho.
But even, if there was one - it should be very easy to make software look up each ISBN elsewhere, too, and reconfirm that it is both formally correct and matching the book in question. There are plenty of places that offer these kinds of lookups, such as book sellers, library catalogs, the ISBN data base, and so on.
Once you have several sources of an ISBN, noone can tell any more, from which of them the copy is. So why rely on Google alone?
Btw. if a statement about an ISBN is sourced, among ohers, with "Source: Google", that does not imply having it from Google. It only states the fact: "Google has it, too."
Purodha
"Markus Krötzsch" markus@semantic-mediawiki.org writes:
On 13.09.2014 21:25, Jeremy Baron wrote:
On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Denny Vrandečić vrandecic@gmail.com wrote:
I am not a lawyer, but if I remember correctly, copyright covers expression, not content. Since the Wikidata data model and its representation in JSON is rather unique, an ISBN number in a Wikidata statement seems to be novel to Wikidata.
Would rewriting a sentence from a book and then entering that sentence in Wikipedia violate copyright?
We have some documentation on that. :)
Regarding data import, a very useful resource is:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Data#Frequently_asked_questions_about_data....
starting the first question (Which components of databases are protected by copyright?), where it says:
""" The data or other contents contained in the database are subject to copyright if they are sufficiently creative. Original poems contained in a database would be protected by copyright, but purely factual data (such as gene names or city populations) would not. Facts are not subject to copyright, nor are the ideas underlying copyrighted content. """
ISBNs are purely factual, non-creative data. Clearly, we do not copy the schema of the other database when importing such a fact -- we have our own schema. However:
""" In contrast to copyright, sui generis database rights are designed to protect a maker's substantial investment in a database. In particular, the right prevents the unauthorized extraction and reuse of a substantial portion of the contents. """
So you may not be allowed to copy "substantial portions" of a database, even if purely factual (there is another question in the FAQ on what this might mean). Note that only some jurisdictions have this concept in the first place.
Besides these general legal rights, of course many sites also have explicit terms of service that you must agree to explicitly before you can get access to their services. In general, this is like a contract between you and the service provider, and the default assumption would be that you are bound by whatever it says. So I suppose that such terms of service could add restrictions on top of applicable copyright (etc.) laws. Of course, it might be the case that some of these restrictions are void under applicable law, but that needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
Markus
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