On 10/20/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Paraphrasing is only sometimes a copyvio. Saying that it _can_ be does not imply that it is. Many of the marvunapp entries are very short, and suggest that there may not be much more to say about a particular character. In such cases the merger principle may be applicable because the information itself is not copyrightable, and the number of ways that you can express that information is very limited.
If we only have occasional short short quoted paragraphs that are properly attributed that comes well within fair use.
Especially when the "nature of the copyright material" is that it itself is heavily based on other copyrighted materials. Their material consists of paraphrasing copyrighted material to begin with (summaries of fictional plots and things like that which are drawing heavily on creative works published by Marvel comics); our use of them to create derivative works (when not copying-and-pasting, of course) seems well within the bounds of "fair use" to me.
One possible source of copyvios is selection, but that is far more difficult to establish. If a person is systematically drawing on marvunapp's material and using that as the basis for what he includes that could be a copyvio, but a small random selection of material would not be.
I don't think Marvunapp is claiming to have a selection scheme except for "everything", which means it would not be a copyrightable selection scheme. If I understand things correctly. In this case it would be no more of a selection scheme as the phonebook.
In your comments you make no mention of your negotiations with marvunapp, and their willingness to find an accomodation. This is better than assuming that because they have complained there is necessarily a copyvio. Even if none of our entries are copyvios and what we do is entirely within the law, they still have a right to exist in their own particular niche, and we should resist the urge to overwhelm them with our size, or to otherwise engage in Borg-like behaviour.
Perhaps the best approach here is to just give more attribution (and links back to them). I am sure they would appreciate that and it might dissolve the whole dispute. There's no reason not to link to them if they are the immediate source of the information, even if they are not the ultimate source of the copyright (it is usually quite helpful in such cases to distinguish between the two).
That being said, their copyright infringement claims, except in the case of the direct copy-and-paste, seem spurious to me, and somewhat ironic. They are claiming that we are infringing upon their creative material, which is itself largely uncreative. They should hope that Marvel will not hold them to the same copyright standards that they hope to try and hold Wikipedia too. People in glass houses shouldn't throw cease-and-desist orders; when one's "creative content" is essentially derivative one should not get *too* mad when another makes derivative products from it (or at least not be surprised).
FF