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.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Projekt Runeberg - freie nordische Literatur -
http://runeberg.org/