[WikiEN-l] Google faking semantics

[Anthony]

On 1/3/07, Gurch <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
> I was thinking more about the restrictions we impose on mirror sites
> (including but not limited to the GFDL), but I accept your point that
> facts aren't copyrightable.

The GFDL is only enforcible to the extent of copyright law.  Not sure
what other restrictions you're talking about.  Trademark law doesn't
seem to apply here either, though.

> Whether a collection of Wikipedia infoboxes
> can be equated with a collection of facts is another matter, though; if
> that was true, surely it could be argued that the rest of the article is
> also no more than a collection of facts, and hence not subject to copyright?
>
An encyclopedia article is more than just a collection of facts.
Those facts are arranged in a particular manner, and expressed in a
particular way.  If you could somehow reduce the encyclopedia article
to the raw facts, and then re-express them in your own words and in a
random order, then you *might* be able to escape the copyright of the
original.  Of course even then, collections of facts are themselves
copyrightable *as a collection*, to the extent that the selection of
which facts to present is creative.

So an encyclopedia article is almost surely copyrightable, whereas a
single fact from an encyclopedia article is almost surely not.  In
between, is where lawyers make their money.

All of this is completely US-centric, of course.  I can't imagine a
jurisdiction where what Google is doing would actually result in a
copyright infringement lawsuit, but there are some pretty strange laws
out there.

Anthony