[WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright

[Geoff Burling]

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Michael Snow wrote:

> Martin Harper wrote:
>
> >>Auppose [the Wikipedia print edition] snagged the
> >>same 55,000 topics as Columbia?  How big would the resulting
> >>text be?
> >>
> >>
> >Wouldn't selecting the exact same 55,000 topics as Colombia be a possible
> >copyright infringement? Choosing an appropriate selection of topics for a
> >concise encyclopedia is a creative act...
> >
> It would indeed. In fact, it's probably one of the better openings we
> could provide for our natural rivals to sue us. Encyclopedia topic
> selection is definitely copyrightable. And given this kind of opening,
> if Columbia really wanted to take Wikipedia down, they could also
> recruit other parties with copyright claims and front the cost of the
> litigation. (For example, the various copyright owners of the images we
> included, if we haven't screened those properly.)
>
> I doubt choosing the exact same topics as Columbia is realistic,
> however. We have different naming conventions, and therefore quite a few
> of the topics would not coincide exactly.
>
I happened to stumbled across Timwi's work earlier, & examining one page
briefly, I noticed a lot of articles that appear to be in the Columbia
Encyclopedia but not in Wikipedia actually are, precisely due to naming
conventions. Once all of these false negatives are weeded out, I'd expect
the list to drop to at least half it's current size.

The only place that I suspect that the group behind the Columbia
Encyclopedia could claim that we "stole" from their editorial selection
would be concerning proper names from the Bible: in my 4th edition of this
work, one of their boasting points is that they have an entry for *every*
proper name in the Bible, a claim that seems to be accurate from a quick
check.

However, both because of our naming conventions & because I doubt
contributors have any reason to excert ourselvs to be as exhaustive, I
don't see a potential problem even here; & if it looks as if there is
one, then let's offer articles for all of the proper names for other
influential works of literature -- like Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides,
Shakespeare, Dickens & Tolstoy. (And a few other works that a contributor
might believe ought to be so treated.)

After all, we must keep in mind that there are only so many ways to
catagorize knowledge, & some duplication is inevitable. It's beleiveable
that all encyclopedias will have articles named "Africa", "Communism",
"Capitalism", and "Hemorrhoids".

Geoff