[WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

[user_Jamesday]

>> >>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.<<

What is far from clear? In US law, it's completely clear that a meaningful selection creates a copyright. If you doubt it, read our article on Feist v. Rural or the decision itself at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340 . It's even more clearly set out in Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata, a 2003 Seventh Circuit decision (citations removed):

"WIREdata???s appeal gets off on the wrong foot, with the contention that Market Drive lacks sufficient originality to be copyrightable. Copyright law unlike patent law does not require substantial originality. ... In fact, it requires only enough originality to enable a work to be distinguished from similar works that are in the public domain, since without some discernible distinction it would be impossible to determine whether a subsequent work was copying a copyrighted work or a public-domain work. This modest requirement is satisfied by Market Drive because no other real estate assessment program arranges the data collected by the assessor in these 456 fields grouped into these 34 categories, and because this structure is not so obvious or inevitable as to lack the minimal originality required"

(Since someone will be tempted to use this at possible copyvios, note that there must be at least minimal creativity, sufficient not to be de minimis (that is, too insubstantial to matter) and that basic English connective words betwen obvious facts in a small amount of text are likely to be de minimis, IMO)

As to whether the pages Timwi created are infringement, they contain a list of about 20,000 articles selected by Columbia, all of theirs, less the ones Timwi could automatically determine weren't in the Wikipedia already. I don't think it's likely that any court would consider a list of 20,000 items the Columbia selected by human work to be anything other than substantial. Hence, it's substantial copying of a copyrighted work.

If you'd like to disagree, please explain why you believe that US law doesn't say that a meaningful selection is copyrightable, citing a case to support your view, or why you believe that a list of 20,000 items from a work is not a substantial selection.

>>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.<<

One purpose for which the list was created is to facilitate the creation articles or redirects of the same name in the Wikipedia. Which will mean that the list is published as part of the Wikipedia, one item per incorporated article title.

>> >>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.<<

It's not an emotional argument. It's a legal argument. Quoting from Stanford University Libraries' Copyright & Fair Use article at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html#5 :

"5. The "Fifth" Fair Use Factor: Are You Good or Bad?

When you review fair use cases, you may find that they sometimes seem to contradict one another or conflict with the rules expressed in this chapter. Fair use involves subjective judgments and are often affected by factors such as a judge or jury 's personal sense of right or wrong. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has indicated that offensiveness is not a fair use factor, you should be aware that a morally offended judge or jury may rationalize its decision against fair use."

Now, you may not like me telling you that there is a fifth factor, but it still does exist and it's one reason why I'm usually writing that our uses are fair: our uses are generally good and for the public good, so judges are likely to choose to interpret the four formal factors in our favor. Not this time.

>>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.<<

No, I'm working out how _I_ would advise them to act if I was giving them legal views and wanted to do the greatest possible amount of harm to a competitor taking money from them. Takedown notices are optional and cheap for the Wikipedia to deal with. That makes using them a bad choice. It's more costly, and hence more harmful to us, to go directly tocourt. The most harmful to us time to do that is when there are lots of unsold printed encyclopedias in a warehouse and about as many just distributed to book stores. It's speculation based on how to hurt us the most, knowing that we are competitors and that those competitors have been or will be watching us closely and looking for ways to hurt us, so they can continue to make money.

>> 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.<<

I agree. It helps them to identify what is happening. Beyond that, it's a sign of how we're going to take money from them in the future and you can be sure that their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders is to prevent us, not say thank you for doing it.

>> I see Jamesday's position as nothing better than extreme copyright paranoia. <<

Thanks for the kind words. The only voice of opposition to me becoming an admin expressed the view that I thought that nothing was copyrighted, in part because I usually write that uses are fair when I write at Possible copyright infringements. I'll be happy to use your words to refute that claim in the future.:) You might consider what it means when I instead write that I believe something is infringement, will result in a legal case and will result in us losing that case.

A note for the Columbia readers, either now or whenever you're doing discovery: I'm not a lawyer and this is not a legal opinion.:)