Re: aspell-nl license

[Peter Makholm <peter@makholm.net>]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 01:53:47PM -0600, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> I think word lists are copyrightable.  The selection is a matter of
>> choice, not simple fact.
>
> Is this a position statement of the FSF, at least if one reads the "are"
> as "should be"?

No need to do that. Word lists might be copyrightable in the European
Union so I've would say that FSF should act as if word lists were
copyrightable. 

> I am curious because traditionally, copyright has been grounded on the
> degree of originality in a work, not the quantity of labor that went
> into producing it.

Traditionally yes. But in the European Union the database directive
made it possible to copyright works only based on people putting some
work in it. It's not as strong as the real copyrigt though only 15
years.

(But at least in the danish implementation fof the directive som
exceptions to the real copyright doesn't hold for database copyright)


Back in 1996 WIPO also discussed copyrightable databases. So look out
it might happen in a country near you.

More info at: ht<tp://www.codata.org/data_access/summary.html>

-- 
 Peter Makholm     |    I congratulate you. Happy goldfish bowl to you, to
 peter@makholm.net |      me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell
 http://hacking.dk |                                               forever
                   |                                      -- The Dead Past