legal paranoia (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Encarta article list)

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Zachary Harden <zscout370 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Due to the above message from Jimbo, and taking no chances, I went ahead and 
> deleted the Encyclopædia Britannica 2004 list, which was designed in a 
> similiar fashion to the Encarta list. I am not sure what other lists can go, 
> but I think we should not take chances with them if the WMF legal are having 
> issues.

Bullocks. This is legal paranoia. Just merge the lists from different sources,
clean-up duplicates, rename entries using our naming conventions, and remove
articles we already have. Much of the prep work to get us to a publishable
point would need to be done off-line, I'm afraid. But it *can* and should be
done. 

Copyright may  still apply but the resulting work should be distinct enough to
not be considered derivative. This is really not any different than exhausting 
several sources as references to write an article. 

For example: I specifically choose to use references that have already
encyclopedia-length treatments of the topic I want to write about. I then
systematically use almost every single fact in each of those references to
write an article for Wikipedia (using my own wording and organization, of
course). If that is illegal, then we are in much bigger trouble than anybody
thinks.

-- mav

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