On 8/28/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Each of these four factors do not have to be considered separately to the exclusion of the others,IIRC, the courts consider them both separately and in combination.
Addressing #1 & #4 together: Our use is non-profit usage that stimulates creativity, certainly, which in turn directly results in the reduction of the market values of EB and Encarta. How can that possibly be fair use? I don't think it can.
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