On 8/29/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is nonsense -- EB doesn't make money based on the number or even the choice of topics. They make it PRIMARILY because of the article CONTENT, which we are not duplicating in the slightest. They also make money because of their so-stressed "reliability" which they've gone to great lengths to explain that they don't think we have a shred of anyway. Noticing that they have an article on "The U.S. Civil War" and then creating our own article with totally separate content on "The U.S. Civil War" does not sound anything like copyright infringement to me. It's no different than flipping open a volume and reading what they have, except it is compiled into one place. It is *bibliographic information* at that -- mere citation!
I offered this the first time and I'll offer it again: if people are really so freaked out over this, I'm happy to write up a little script which would take any given list of article titles and see if they were available on Wikipedia. I'm sure we can find someone who can host it. Otherwise I'd be happy to host it on my own servers as "research". If it aids Wikipedia in writing good articles, so be it!
I'm fine with being copyright paranoid in situations regarding things which are known to be copyrightable. But with something as vague as "article titles in an encyclopedia which may not be in this other encyclopedia", I'm less inclined unless there was a direct legal threat or request for removal (in which case I'm happy to lean towards the idea of prudence and a lack-of-lawsuit).
FF
Their choice of what articles to include is a very significant part of their content. The full list is a unique expression of editorial choice of what parts of human knowledge to include, and as such is protected by copyright law. Our list is an edited copy of theirs. Our use of significant portions of their copyright work in order to create and improve direct competition for them, the copyright holders, is certainly not protected under fair use.
I don't think I can make it any simpler than that.
In the end, it's up to a judge somewhere. The judge may not agree, but in this world of capitalist corporatism, I'd be willing to wager a lot of money that you're wrong.