Jimmy Wales stated for the record: I win! I got 11 of them; Danny got 9. Tabbed browsing is wonderful. -- Sean Barrett | The determined programmer can write sean(a)epoptic.com | a FORTRAN program in any language.

Due to the above message from Jimbo, and taking no chances, I went ahead and deleted the Encyclopædia Britannica 2004 list, which was designed in a similiar fashion to the Encarta list. I am not sure what other lists can go, but I think we should not take chances with them if the WMF legal are having issues. Rgds, Zach Harden (User:Zscout370)

And it seems to me, as we've discussed on here before, that it would easily fall under the "fair use" clause. We are using an insubstantial part of their encyclopedia; we are using it for our own internal purposes (it is in the Wikipedia namespace, is it not?); we are non-profit; we are not claiming copyright; we are not defrauding them in any way; we are not even looking at the content itself, just bibliographic information. FF On 8/28/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote In any case, the big things seem to be going so well for WP ($240K new funds, Alexa rankings up with the IMDB and Canadian Google), that looking for potential snags is rather more like the avoidance of complacency and hubris. Charles

On 9/9/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Simply combining the lists doesn't solve the problem, as it could be deemed to be a derivative work, as others have pointed out. But there is a difference between having the list available to a restricted list of folks, or putting on meta: or in the en:Wikipedia: namespace which is effectively "published." For example, as part of my research, I have several "article lists" from Encarta, Britannica and some other CD-ROM encyclopedias, but I've hesitated to make them public or contribute them to WP, for exactly this reason. Talking to a few lawyer folks on my campus has effectively convinced me I would not have a strong case for fair use/fair dealing. I'm willing to (and would like to be) proved wrong. -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 8/18/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I know, case law sucks, doesn't it? Such is the nature of fair use. :)

Well, that's implicit in any reasoned legal judgment about these things. It's not just a case of whether one would win on the merits in the end or not, it's whether the opponent has good reason to think that they might win as well. If that's the case, you're in trouble no matter how it goes down, unless you've got a lot of money to burn for a the purposes of principle. The goal of all of our work should be to keep ourselves not only in a situation where we would win should we ever go to court, but also so that the people who would have motivation to sue us would have no reason to believe they could win. This is why I consider our "fair use" policy in general to be preemptive -- it's a policy of announcing, "Hey, this is what we'll say, and we'll probably win, so don't even try it." It's as close as we can get, in the confines of the current copyright law, of being at all secure in these things, since "fair use" is only a defensive claim (you can't sue somebody for obstructing your "fair use" of their materials, as a counter-example). If the legal-types think that Encarta or whomever would have a good reason to think they could win such a case, then I'd defer to them. These lists are probably useful but they aren't essential to the project, and the principle they stand for is not, in my mind, really something worth the hassle (in comparison with the other things this project stands for). FF On 9/10/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

But I'd imagine those probably fell under the category of obviously frivolous lawsuits. By their very nature, one can't avoid those. But I'm fairly sure that in most fair use cases, the defendant doesn't get a whole lot, and often doesn't even have their legal fees paid for in the end. That's the impression I got from Lessig's book, anyway. But I'd be interesting in reading any caselaw where people have won in such instances, if you could send me any references. FF On 8/18/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:

Quick, someone download the database dump before they update it.... OK, maybe you can nix the "quick" part. Anthony On 8/28/05, Zachary Harden <zscout370(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 David Gerard wrote: I also would be willing to host a mirror offsite; send it to alphasigmax at gmail dot com with "Wikipedia" in the subject :) - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: A single source list like this may very well be in a legal gray area. But would not a list that was derived from multiple sources minus articles we already happened to have be OK? Certainly this would be legal given the fact that in the U.S. an alphabetical list of names with addresses by it has *no* copyright protection. I don't feel that out-right deleting is in order. A merger with the other lists first *is*. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

--- Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: I can see a valid argument that if all we did was trim each list, then the resulting work may be considered derivative and thus not legal. More than that should be done to be safe ASIDE: The phone book analogy I previously stated may not apply since a phone book is an unimaginative exhaustive list of names and numbers organized alphabetically, while an encyclopedia's list of topics is a tiny sub-set of human knowledge chosen for relevance. Thus the first has no copyright protection, while I can see a strong argument that the second may. That sounds like a good plan to me. But much of the merger work should be done off-line just to be on the safe side. Several people could each take a letter in the alphabet from each list to work on off-line. Then people will work on each resulting letter-list the same way they are now once it is put onto Wikipedia. There will be a bottleneck at the offline merger stage, but we can still do this. It will just take a bit more work and a bit longer than the way we were doing it (although merging the different lists may also reduce duplicated effort). -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com