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

[Fastfission]

And it seems to me, as we've discussed on here before, that it would
easily fall under the "fair use" clause. We are using an insubstantial
part of their encyclopedia; we are using it for our own internal
purposes (it is in the Wikipedia namespace, is it not?); we are
non-profit; we are not claiming copyright; we are not defrauding them
in any way; we are not even looking at the content itself, just
bibliographic information.

FF

On 8/28/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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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