What's the source for this information? Obviously, the information
itself isn't copyrighted. But does that mean that entire factbooks can be copied wholesale? An interesting question.
(Not a legal opinion): To date, facts or collections of facts can't be copyrighted, although there are pernicious efforts to change this. However, the presentation of the facts can be. A particular list of the properties of Beryllium, in a particular order, might well be copyrighted. People have copyrighted facsimile copies of out of copyright books, on the basis of the slight changes that reprinting introduces, but I don't know how successful such attempts are.
"A particular list of the properties of Beryllium, in a particular order, might well be copyrighted." In that case, I have a concern that the present
Beryllium and other similar-formatted articles are copyrighted.
A more educated legal opinion: the governing authority is USSC
Feist v. Rural, a case of one phone directory copying numbers from another. In that case, the court affirmed the doctrine that data itself is beyond copyright and dismissed the case. What copyright covers, they said, is the act of creativity, which can be expressed in terms of selecting which data to express, organizing the data a certain way, or wording it a certain way. In the case of phone book entries, it was ruled that an alphabetical list was about as uncreative as it gets, and so no copyright applied. But in the instant case here, I think we may want to come up with a format of our own (which can't be any worse than the one there any way) and just plug the data into it. This could be done programmatically, though, from the existing text. It's OK to *use* copyrighted material to produce non-infringing material.
Yeah, I think this isn't that hard to deal with. We can make some modifications to this to be extra-safe.
What is the original source? Perhaps someone can go to another source and confirm the information and add a few more tidbits.
It's just facts, and if someone wants to sue us over something like this, then it will just be good publicity for us and bad publicity for them. (And, by the way, since it is my money at stake, I'm the only one who gets to decide about these risks.) ;-) --Jimbo Wales
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