user_Jamesday wrote:
A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and
the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
It MAY be copyrightable. The matter is far from clear.
The company has a major financial incentive to take us
to court bcause we are competitors. Our normal transformative use fair use argument
doesn't exist because they are an encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far
tougher to argue.
We are not planning to publish the list; it is solely for internal use;
items which have been considered would be deleted from the list. The
titles are only a small part of the entire work. If it would turn out
that there is no actual copyright, then fair use is not an issue.
We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor
"are they good people?" positive result in this case.
This emotional argument would be totally irrelevant in a law suit.
They would take us to court and this is free ammunition
forthem to use to do it. Whether they do it before a print edition or after, to do the
greatest possible harm by requiring all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not
knowable by us.
Have they said that they would? Has anyone received a takedown notice?
You are speculating about what they might do; that's what copyright
paranoia is all about. The print edition would not even resemble their
list, and nobody is suggesting that it would. That alone would
establish that we are only using the list for research purposes. If
their position is so unknowable we should give ourselves the benefit of
the doubt.
We must not use the selection of articles made by
another encyclopedia as a checklist for articles we want.
It's only a list of articles to consider; we may not even use them.
If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their
problem but we must not conspire with them to facilitate it.
If I had a functioning website, and adequate technical skills, I would
have no paranoia about including the material.
It's not a problem to do things like noting that
it's common for encyclopedias to use "lastname, firstname" form for names
and add redirects of that sort for every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not
a problem to note that encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word
pope and create redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and
systematically worked on in this way.
Creating all those redirects would be an utter wast of time when we
could easily reformat the names on the lists. We already have articles
on most (if not all) the popes, so those names would soon be removed
from the list.
It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of
referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site.
They should be happy with that.
It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does
lots of potential harm and shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to
create lastname, firstname redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.
That would make no difference; the items in the list would be the same.
I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright
paranoia. It's important to respect copyright in clear cases, but where
there is a serious and reasonable doubt we deserve to take a more
favorable interpretation.
Since Jimbo would be the one in position to be sued, he should declare
the level of risk that he wants to accept in this. If he is highly risk
avers, than maybe someone else with appropriate software can put it on
his site.
Ec