On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
The specific reason I would claim that the telephone directory case does not apply is that the dumps are in a machine readable format that is intended to be read by one, and only one, machine: MediaWiki. There must be another domain of applicable case law.
The main article dumps are in a human readable XML format. Myself and others use them in various ways without parsing them through Mediawiki.
The principle point though is whether the selection or arrangement of the dumps contain the minimal spark of creativity necessary for an independent copyright (the core issue of Feist). Personally, I would argue they do not. The selection is comprehensive (all data of a give class), and the arrangement is quite obvious. (Perhaps not as obvious as a phone book, but still a fairly standard presentation consistent with the way comparable databases are communicated.)
I suppose one could try to argue the point, but I would definitely take the side that the arrangement and selection of information in the dumps is not a creative act.
-Robert Rohde
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/8 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20081008/
These subcollections obviously pass the threshold for creativity. A court case on telephone directories, which is simply a two or three column
output,
has very little applicability to the complex formats published by the
WMF.
I also recognize this to be a legal grey area, and my opinion unfounded.
But I believe this would have significant consequences, no?
That's not obvious to me at all. I think anyone putting together a collection of dumps of Wikipedia would do so in essentially the same way.
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