| Tgr added a comment. |
I think this proposal mixes two different things in an unhelpful way:
- Wikidata (AIUI) largely ignores legal protections on databases ("sui generis database rights") as these protections don't exist in the US. This is technically legal but creates legal uncertainty for users and reusers in the EU.
- Databases can be protected by copyright when the individual entries are protected (would be very unusual for the kind of data imported into Wikidata) or when the selection of which entries to incorporate into the database was a creative act (e.g. a dictionary or a subjective toplist).
The second would be a pretty clear-cut copyright violation but does not apply to most databases. "Exhaustive" databases (such as the list of all scientific articles in a certain journal or the list of all scientific institutions in France) are not creative works and cannot be copyrighted. (Arguably they are not covered by database rigths either as they are created during the normal course of operating a journal / ministry and do not require a significant investment specifically to collect or clean the contents of the database, which is the prerequisite to database rights according to the ECJ, but there is significant legal uncertainty around that.)
So this is more of a question of (1) whether the WMF is comfortable with ignoring EU law (as it did in some other cases, such as scans of old paintings), although technically that would only be tested when someone files a DMCA takedown request; and (2) whether the community is OK with Wikidata being (presumably) hard to reuse in the EU.
Cc: Tgr, Ayack, Gnom1, MichaelMaggs, MisterSynergy, Pasleim, Cirdan, 0x010C, Sylvain_WMFr, Denny, Ivanhercaz, Pintoch, Lydia_Pintscher, Lea_Lacroix_WMDE, Aklapper, Psychoslave, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, LawExplorer, ZhouZ, Mpaulson, Wikidata-bugs, aude, jayvdb, Slaporte, Mbch331, Jay8g
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