On Wednesday 06 November 2002 05:30 pm, David Turner wrote: > On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 15:40, Joe Moore wrote: > > Derek Gladding said: > > > Hypothetical question... > > > > Hypothetical answer below... > > > > > If one took a spell-checker, such as Aspell, then: > > > > > > - piped the whole of Usenet through it for a couple of weeks > > > - automatically removed all sequences of characters that failed > > > - removed all duplicate words from the result > > > > > > Would the resulting list of words be a "new" creation, unencumbered by > > > any license attached to the spell-checker ? ;-) > > > > No, this would be a derivative work of the Usenet postings, which are > > copyright their authors. > > > > You'd have to get permission from all Usenet posters. > > It would not be a derivative work of Usenet, because the only elements > copied would be uncopyrightable individual words. > > Usenet is, of course, a poor place to get content, because your wordlist > would be filled with (a) foreign-language messages and spam, (b) made-up > words like froup and kibo which (probably) shouldn't go into the > dictionay. >
You need another coffee, Novi ;-) You missed the bit about piping Usenet *through* Aspell to generate a "different" word-list that just happened to be the same... - Derek
