Ray Saintonge wrote:
Dictionaries have their own set of problems. The Webster was frequently in court during the late 19th century over infringements of its copyrights. It lost some significant cases. Cookbooks also fall into this class of works that are really a reflection of a society's collective knowledge. If I invent a dictionary definition that is identical to what is found in a published dictionary I am not infringing their copyright.
Swedish copyright is life+70 years, but for collections of data or catalogs there is a special "catalog protection" (katalogskydd), which lasts only 15 years after the publication. Legislative texts explicitly mention phone books, TV program listings, and compilations of lunch menues of a city's restaurants as examples. It is unclear how or whether this applies to dictionaries, and I haven't found any case law. (I should add that I'm not a lawyer.) On the sliding scale from simple lists of words (spelling dictionaries) to complete encyclopedias, I guess it could be hard to draw the line exactly where catalogs end and full copyright starts. German law makes no such distinction, but seems to grant life+70 to all kinds of dictionaries.
I'm in the middle of this problem. I want to digitize some dictionaries, where the main editor died in 1922, but his two assistants died in the 1950s and 1960s. If these dictionaries are covered by 15 years of "catalog protection" I could just go ahead, but if they are covered by life+70 I must either ask the heirs for permission or refrain from digitizing. The only dictionaries that I have digitized are old enough to be outside of life+70:
Swedish-Latin, 1875, http://runeberg.org/swelatin/ Swedish-German, 1919, http://runeberg.org/hoppe/ Swedish spelling, 1923, http://runeberg.org/saol/8/
Any pointers to case law (such as the Webster cases) would be interesting to me.