On 30/11/12 19:18, Sven Manguard wrote:
My understanding is this:
The elements of a database that are copyrightable are the selection and the arrangement.
There is no way that we're going to come close to the arrangement of any other database, so I'm not going to discuss that.
I know the last mail concerning this is some days ago, but I just wanted to mention my understanding. Maybe it's helpful for "unweirding" the fact about database licenses.
Compared to a database a text is the selection and arrangement of different words. The text with it's meaning or even no meaning (Lorem ipsum?) is copyrightable but not the single word.
So I assume that single facts (or database items) are not copyrightable just like single words. Only the database (or even a view?) as a selection and arrangement of various items is copyrightable.
Authors often have the problem, that there is already a text and they are not allowed to just copy this into Wikipedia. They rewrite it with their own collection of words, which can – of course – also reuse words from the original text, because those are not copyrightable.
Thus it should also be possible to use the own collection of data-items that are also part of proprietary data bases to create an own, free-licensable database.
I understand Wikibase as a kind of NOSQL-Database, with a list (it is not a real table) of items with internationalized titles and aliases. Each of this items can contain various properties, but it does not have to.
So item1 can contain property1 which item2 does not contain. Therefore speaking of a table is IMHO not really correct, because the only real columns you have are ID, titles and aliases. While persons have a birthday, companies and organizations have a founding date.
Cheers
Marco