[WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

[Ray Saintonge]

user_Jamesday wrote:

>A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
>
It MAY be copyrightable.  The matter is far from clear.

>The company has a major financial incentive to take us to court bcause we are competitors. Our normal transformative use fair use argument doesn't exist because they are an encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far tougher to argue. 
>
We are not planning to publish the list; it is solely for internal use; 
items which have been considered would be deleted from the list.  The 
titles are only a small part of the entire work.  If it would turn out 
that there is no actual copyright, then fair use is not an issue.

>We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.
>
This emotional argument would be totally irrelevant in a law suit.

>They would take us to court and this is free ammunition forthem to use to do it. Whether they do it before a print edition or after, to do the greatest possible harm by requiring all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not knowable by us.
>
Have they said that they would?  Has anyone received a takedown notice? 
 You are speculating about what they might do; that's what copyright 
paranoia is all about.  The print edition would not even resemble their 
list, and nobody is suggesting that it would.  That alone would 
establish that we are only using the list for research purposes.  If 
their position is so unknowable we should give ourselves the benefit of 
the doubt.  

>We must not use the selection of articles made by another encyclopedia as a checklist for articles we want.
>
It's only a list of articles to consider; we may not even use them.

> If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their problem but we must not conspire with them to facilitate it.
>
If I had a functioning website, and adequate technical skills, I would 
have no paranoia about including the material.

>It's not a problem to do things like noting that it's common for encyclopedias to use "lastname, firstname" form for names and add redirects of that sort for every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not a problem to note that encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word pope and create redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and systematically worked on in this way. 
>
Creating all those redirects would be an utter wast of time when we 
could easily reformat the names on the lists.  We already have articles 
on most (if not all) the popes, so those names would soon be removed 
from the list.

>It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site.
>
They should be happy with that.

>It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does lots of potential harm and shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to create lastname, firstname redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.
>
That would make no difference; the items in the list would be the same.

I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright 
paranoia.  It's important to respect copyright in clear cases, but where 
there is a serious and reasonable doubt we deserve to take a more 
favorable interpretation.

Since Jimbo would be the one in position to be sued, he should declare 
the level of risk that he wants to accept in this.  If he is highly risk 
avers, than maybe someone else with appropriate software can put it on 
his site.

Ec