[Wikipedia-l] comment on wikipedia

[Delirium]

Alex T. wrote:

>This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If the content is
>so generic as just to be knowledge then it is not really copyrightable as
>it would fall in the public domain.
>
>This would also mean that the copyright claim is so weak that very liberal
>fair use could be made of Wikipedia.
>
>So you don't even have to worry  about the GFDL and its adaption to
>the Wiki process as broad fair use and a large dose of public domain
>knowledge means it is very hard to infringe on Wikipedia to begin with.
>
>Perhaps once could even go so far as to suggest that the perfect NPOV
>article
>cannot have a copyright as it is so objective that there is no personal
>expressiveness in it, it is a conglomeration only of knowledge.
>  
>
At the risk of treading into wikilegal-l ground again, I think it'll 
probably take a big shift in copyright law interpretation before 
something like Wikipedia is deemed uncopyrightable.  It's true that 
facts and plain knowledge aren't copyrightable, but so far that's been 
interpreted mainly to mean things like lists of telephone numbers in a 
phone book.  It's a pretty big jump from that to an encyclopedia, which 
is at the very least several orders of magnitude more creative.  If 
nothing else, it takes a certain measure of creative prose to explain 
complex issues succinctly and clearly, as evidenced by the large amount 
of factual stuff out there that is neither succinct nor clear.

-Mark