Fred Bauder wrote:
If Safeway made a list of products offered by WalMart which Safeway did not offer?
It would depend on how Safeway created the list. If Safeway sends employees to WalMart stores to write down every item they can find that Safeway doesn't offer, that's entirely legitimate because there's no copying (in the copyright sense) involved. If Safeway somehow obtains WalMart master internal list of merchandise and takes information from it, then they are copying. However, it might still be okay for them, because the information is purely factual and frankly, I don't think that creating a list of the merchandise you offer qualifies as a process of selection in the "creative" sense usually expected by copyright law. Rather, if there's a violation of law here, it's likely to be a matter of trade secrets.
I think our situation is different. Because our "products" are entirely documentary, the only way we can create a list of our competitors' products is by copying. And there is definitely a process of selection in determining what subjects to cover in an encyclopedia. So this list is not simply a copy of purely factual information that has had no creative selection or arrangement applied to it. As such, I consider it highly problematic.
--Michael Snow