Fastfission wrote:
Tables of contents are, to my knowledge, generally
considered easily
and unquestionably covered by fair use clauses -- there is no
"creativity" that goes into simply compiling a list of what your
encyclopedia has in it, and in the end this is essentially just
citation information, which of course is never considered copyrighted
(how could you attribute if you could not cite?). If one is to be
copyright paranoid (something which I somewhat support in some
circumstances), there are plenty of more dodgy uses of fair use in
Wikipedia than this.
If you want to claim fair use for this list, please review and analyze
the fair use factors and tell us how this list qualifies for fair use.
Fair use is analyzed on a case-by-case basis, so you can't really just
say glibly that a particular type of content is always fair use. It's
the *use* that matters much more than the nature of the original content.
There *is* creativity involved in a list of what an encyclopedia
contains, quite specifically due to the selection process involved in
determining what subjects go into the encyclopedia in the first place.
I agree that we have lots of dubious claims of fair use, but that
doesn't make this one okay.
--Michael Snow