The Uninvited Co., Inc wrote:
Paraphrased can still be a copyvio in most jurisdictions, including the U.S., when the overall sentence and paragraph structure remains the same. It starts looking like a derived work when the ideas are organized and presented the same way even though the word choices are different.
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.
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.
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.
It would be very interesting to see reports on negotiations.
Ec