Hi all,
Catching up on a question from 21 May.
On Thu, 21 May 2009, Chris Bizer wrote:
I think that we would even be willing to go a step further and release
DBpedia under a even more liberal license, but we donÿÿt know if we are
allowed to do this. We are not lawyers and there seem to be tricky
points about databases being creative works and differences between
European and US law on this. We also donÿÿt know if extracting the first
250 words of each Wikipedia article and putting them into a database is
creative enough to justify to have this database under a more liberal
license then Wikipedia.
The Feist case in the USA shows that you can copy a telephone book without
getting into problem with the copyright.
The individual fact can probably not copyrightable if they are
sufficiently short. I think that 250 works would be long enough to have
copyright on its own: The phrase "E.T. Phone Home" was copyrightable in
the USA - if I remember correctly.
The copyright law for Wikipedia and DBpedia as a collection is different
between USA and countries of the European Union, due to the EU Database
Directive of 1996. A collection of fact and data may be protected in the
EU, regardless of whether the individual data items are copyrightable or
not. That means that you cannot copy a 'substantial part' of a database if
the database constitutes a 'substantial investment'. It is possible (in my
opinion quite) that the set of Wikipedia templates constitute a database,
so that the authors (collectively?) has database right. So perhaps
European Wikipedia authors can claim database right against the
European(?) DBpedia. But the situation is very hazy due to the
international nature of Wikipedia/DBpedia and its authors and re-users.
Wikipedia is in USA so perhaps the European Directive does not reach there
even thought authors and database copier are European...
I guess the DBpedia cannot claim (European database) copyright, because
DBpedia does not 'construct' the data: This is what the Wikipedia authors
do. In a Danish court case (Ofir v. Home) the company Home lost its
database right to the Ofir search engine because Home did not construct
the data itself - that was done by Home's franchise takers.
Somewhat similarly was the 'Hill case' in the European Court.
My guess is that the 'safest' for DBpedia would be to honor Wikipedia
authors database rights and just re-distribute the data under the same
license that Wikipedia uses.
I am not a lawyer. I have just recently looked into the issue due to my
own database-like wiki. And I must say I find the situation very hazy.
Maybe constructive examples of the use of database right, such as a
copylefted DBpedia could help pave the way for a global clarification.
/Finn
___________________________________________________________________
Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark
Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging
http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/
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