2011/11/7 André Schnabel <[email protected]>: > Hi Rob, > > Am 07.11.2011 16:51, schrieb Rob Weir: >> >> On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Andre Schnabel<[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> The jurisdiction of the creator only matters in the case of local >> infringement or in the context of international treaties. And I don't >> believe any treaties have recognized sui generis IP rights for >> collections of facts, i.e., databases. It has been discussed but >> there is no agreement. See the WIPO statement on this: >> >> http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/activities/databases.html > > This is not a statement on IP rights for databases - it is a statement on IP > rights for > *Non-Original Databases* . > > We obviously disagree on this part of the text: > " The originality requirement that a database must constitute an > intellectual creation > by reason of the selection or arrangement of its contents in order to enjoy > copyright > protection means that some databases are not protected ..." > > So obviously some databases actually are protected. Of course - if you > think, that a > dictionary is just a mere collection of words you would obviously come to > the > conclusion that this is no intellectual creation. >
For example, an anthology of poetry, where an editor has selected and ordered specific works. The anthology can have a copyright. Put the anthology into a database and it can still be protected. MS Encarta CD encyclopedia, an example from years ago. But I don't think a selection of "all French words in alphabetical order, along with well-known, non-original facts about these words", would receive that same protection. And if it did, anyone could extract the same facts and put them in a different arrangement with a different selection, and use that. That is the key difference. With the anthology, the underlying poems are still individually copyrighted. But with a dictionary, I think the underlying facts are not. So the practical protection is far less, since fair use would allow the extraction and reuse of the underlying facts. > btw ... if IBM does have dictionaries available, why don't you just publish > those, if > there is no copyright protection in place? Doing so would end this > discussion very > quickly andwould be a great contribution to the project. > This was already discussed in another part of this thread. Our dictionaries are not in Hunspell format. We use a different spell checker altogether. So to make use of these dictionaries would require a format conversion. I'm not sure how hard that would be. -Rob > regards, > > André >
