I think an easy thought-experiment here is to imagine what this letter to EB would look like: Dear Sirs, We've created an alphabetical list of articles your encyclopedia contains, and subtracted from it all articles which we do not have in our encyclopedia, for the purposes of indicating to our own editors possible areas of deficiency in our own work. ... Then what? "Do you mind?" "Do you think you'd plausibly claim that this was copyright infringement?" I don't even know what the next line would be, because the idea that this list -- one in which we've put as much "creativity" as was possibly put in assembling it -- would somehow constitute copyright infringement is -- in my non-lawyerly opinion -- totally bonkers. Personally I would contend -- and I think a lawyer could easily argue in court -- that a list of a table of contents, with many entries removed, does not constitute a creative work (it is NOT the same thing as the "creativity" put into arranging their encyclopedia, something which I still don't think is clear-cut copyrightable at all). More importantly, I think that EB's lawyers would be worried enough that such could be plausibly argued that they would NOT bother sueing over it. They'd have a hard time arguing potential damages -- what, that they're in the business of selling article headings? There is likely no simple legal answer to this (i.e., no clear-cut precedent), BUT there it also seems like a vanishingly small possibility this would ever be a problem, and enough plausible arguments that this is NOT a copyright infringement that a conscientious company would not want to bother with the expenses and time to attempt to prosecute something which could go either way. As for non-conscientious companies, there's nothing that can be done about that anyway, and imagine if Wikipedia ever gets seens as an organization with money to be sued for, those will crop up on their own anyway. So okay. What am I -- not a lawyer, not pretending to be, but just someone who has read a few books on copyright and patent law -- saying? 1. I doubt that a list of article titles can be considered a copyrightable work. I doubt that "topics of articles chosen for inclusion" would be considered a copyrightable work. 2. If so, however, our fair use claims are something like: A. Character of use: Research about our own nonprofit encyclopedia, makes explicit the source of the data. B. Nature of the work to be used: Citation information, factual, published; normally considered necessary for attribution in the first place, normally considered uncopyrighted. Nothing unique to this particular source (that is, no more unique than it is in any encyclopedia -- whether EB or not). C. Amount of work to be used: Minimum amount possible -- strictly logical information, minus a lot of it which we have pruned away. D. Effect on market for original: in terms of "arragement," none. EB sells full articles, not arrangements. If we duplicated their arrangement and filled in every article content with the words "peanut butter" it would not give us any market advantage over them -- the arrangement is not what they sell, the content as a whole is. 3. Copyright law is, more than anything else, built upon lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits. It seems unlikely to me that EB would: A. Care much about this B. Think they had much of a case on this C. Want to waste their resources finding out D. Even consider this an issue if we didn't raise it with them first Again, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an expert in this, I'm not even nonchalant about copyright issues (they'll do us in eventually -- but just not this one!). I just don't think this is really worth worrying about. It does raise the question of whether Wikimedia has their own lawyers or not, though. If there was at least one person paid part-time to do these sort of consultations, we wouldn't have to rely on back-of-the-envelope approaches like this. Law is not something which functions well by consensus of non-experts, obviously. I recommend not contacting them and just going with the assumption, made in good faith, that we're just looking at non-copyrightable information -- bibliographic, logical, citation, etc. -- that is no more copyrightable than the titles of articles we use in our references to our articles. Anyway -- that's my take on it. Again, not a lawyer. Just another editor. I don't think there's any easy answer with this sort of thing -- there never is with most copyright law questions. It'll always be something in terms of "probabilities," and I think it is far enough on the "likely not a problem" end of the scale to not worry about or see any need to take down the page. But that's just my thoroughly off-the-cuff interpretation. FF

--- Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote: While that is certainly true I do think that our use of this list is fair. We are *not* creating a WikiReader that covers the same topics that EB covers. That would clearly not be fair. Instead we are using that list just to assist us in filling gaps that exist in our coverage; when any particular item is filled, we delete it from the list. -- mav (aka IANAL) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail