[Wikipedia-l] Another copyright question

[Daniel Mayer]

On Thursday 18 July 2002 04:31 pm, Eclecticology wrote:
> Rewriting the material in
> your own words instead of translating it would not be a breach of
> copyright.

I sure hope so -- I've been rewriting Los Alamos National Laboratory text for 
the elements articles to circumvent their stupid copyright notice. Their 
copyright notice states that material produced by them and displayed on their 
website can only be used for non-commercial purposes and only if their 
copyright notice is displayed on any copies. This agers me because everything 
they do is mostly paid for by US federal tax dollars with much of the 
remaining money comming from California state tax dollars via the UC Regents 
(although CA state produced IP is /not/ in the public domain unless there is 
an explicit statement to the fact -- which also angers me).  

However, much of what LANL provides in their periodic table needs heavy 
copyediting anyway, so I really don't care that much about having to take an 
extra step or two (at least then the resulting wikipedia articles will be 
that much more unique -- although rewriting is time consuming and has slowed 
the conversion process).   

--maveric149