On 4/2/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Seth Finkelstein wrote:
Under US law, the keywords you would want to understandare called "compilation copyright".
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
"A "compilation" is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship."
But if this list was compiled by Wikipedia editors (as JzG claimed when arguing that it's OR) then the _editors_ own the compilation copyright and are perfectly within their rights to release it under the GFDL.
And actually, "facts about the show" CAN be owned!http://www.rcfp.org/news/1998/0824i.html
"SECOND CIRCUIT--A trivia quiz book testing readers' knowledge and recollection of lines from the 'Seinfeld' television show does not qualify as a "fair use" and as such constitutes copyright infringement
..."
In general, you really, really, don't want to try to getuseful answers to questions of copyright law by throwing them out to a mailing list and debating them from intuition.
But we the editors have to make these sorts of decisions dozens or hundreds of times per day. We _have_ to try to figure out what copyright law means, we can't go running to a professional lawyer with every question. And personally, I believe that any law that is so byzantine and obscure that a layperson it applies to cannot figure out what's legal most of the time is a really bad law. If copyright law was like that we might as well just give up because if someone wants to sue there's really nothing at all we could do to avoid it.
Exactly the point of avoiding copyright paranoia.