On 07/21/2013 07:55 PM, Amgine wrote:
If I recall correctly, under US copyright case law a word's definition cannot be copyrighted. There are only a limited set of ways to express the definition of a term, and it is recognized this puts an undue burden on new works.
However, a *collection* of terms may be copyrighted under the database portion of the copyright rules.
(I have a dual role here, both as user:LA2 in Wiktionary and as the founder of Project Runeberg, where that dictionary was digitized.)
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right "database rights" exist in the EU, but not in the U.S. Such a bill was introduced, but rejected, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_protection_bill
When EU introduced the catalog protection in the mid 1990s, they borrowed the concept from the Scandinavian countries, which in the late 1950s jointly renewed their copyright laws (Denmark 1958?, Sweden 1960, Norway 1961). It was designed to give a short protection, 10 years after the first publication, to a catalog, table or listing, hence the name "catalog protection" (Danish: katalogbeskyttelse, Swedish: katalogskydd). Later, this has been extended to 15 years, but it's still based on the year of publication, and not the death year of the author.
The catalog is a collection of facts or short entries which cannot be copyrighted each on their own. However, it is not clear how long such an entry can be before it is eligible for copyright.
In each case, we have (at least) two different issues to discuss: 1) Are the individual entries copyrightable? 2) Is the entire collection protected by database rights?
The 2nd issue is the easiest: Database rights, where they are applicable, only last for 15 years. So anything older than 15 years is free from database rights.
The harder issue is whether individual entries are copyrightable. Nobody gives a clear definition.
When digitizing books in Project Runeberg, I have made the assumption that entries in spelling dictionaries, translation dictionaries, and who-is-who books are not copyrightable. Based on this assumption, I have digitized a large number of such works from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark which are older than 15 years but younger than 70 years. This started three and a half year ago.
So far, nobody has protested. Since the publishers of these works are still around, and I'm not trying to hide, they are free to express their dissatisfaction, but they have not.
(My assumption does not extend to etymological dictionaries where each entry is a little story in its own right. For such dictionaries, I respect the common life+70 copyright.)
In practice, the who-is-who entries are never copied from Project Runeberg to Wikipedia, but completely rewritten in standard Wikipedia prose, using the digitized book as a source reference, as in this case, http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Blix
The source reference is a 1977 who-is-who, http://runeberg.org/vemardet/1977/0139.html
To reuse a scanned dictionary in Wiktionary, similar transformations are needed.