[WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

[user_Jamesday]

Rural lost to Feist because Rural had included every eligible telephone subscriber in the telephone directory. That is, because Rural had done no selection. Since there was no selection, the list of subscribers was just factual information in an obvious order and not copyrightable.

All encyclopedias do select which articles to include and under what titles, a tiny subset of every possible encyclopedic subject. That selection is copyrighted. What we see created so far is a portion of a robot run which was in the process of adding a very substantial set of additional redirects. You might want to read the paragraph under Implications at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural :

'cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover'

This is a case of a use of the choice of which facts to cover.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jake Nelson" 
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 20:10:55 -0600
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

user_Jamesday wrote:
> At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#Marc
h_2 .
>
> A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of
articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.

See the decision of the US Supreme Court in [[Feist v. Rural]], 1991.
(Thanks to Raul654 to pointing out our article on it) It's directly
connected to this.

It's worth noting that we're not even listing their entire set of titles-
only the difference between us and them. This could be considered
comparative advertising- see Sony v. Bleem (9th Circuit Court of Appeals,
2000) for a recent case in which fair use was upheld for what many called an
edge case.

Also, nearly all the redirects created are obvious- <lastname>, <firstname>
naming, different formulations of titles, transliteration of foreign
characters (a-ring to double-a, c-cedilla to c, accent marks, tildes), and
so forth. The more esoteric Biblical names, mentioned earlier, all come from
texts or translations that are within the public domain (typically via
Easton's). Moreover, the suggestion on the discussion page that we should
also delete all the redirects created as a result is ludicrous.

Based on all of these and a number of other factors (our nonprofit status
among them, but that's relatively minor), I'd say we're well within bounds.
[[meta:Avoid Copyright Paranoia]], people.

-- Jake

PS: IANAL. I miss Alex.

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