On Thursday 18 July 2002 04:31 pm, Eclecticology wrote:
Rewriting the material in your own words instead of translating it would not be a breach of copyright.
I sure hope so -- I've been rewriting Los Alamos National Laboratory text for the elements articles to circumvent their stupid copyright notice. Their copyright notice states that material produced by them and displayed on their website can only be used for non-commercial purposes and only if their copyright notice is displayed on any copies. This agers me because everything they do is mostly paid for by US federal tax dollars with much of the remaining money comming from California state tax dollars via the UC Regents (although CA state produced IP is /not/ in the public domain unless there is an explicit statement to the fact -- which also angers me).
However, much of what LANL provides in their periodic table needs heavy copyediting anyway, so I really don't care that much about having to take an extra step or two (at least then the resulting wikipedia articles will be that much more unique -- although rewriting is time consuming and has slowed the conversion process).
--maveric149
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