On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Dafydd Harries wrote: > Kanjidic's copyright file states (lines 208-212): > > "The commercial utilization of the frequency numbers is prohibited > without written permission from Jack Halpern. Use by individuals and > small groups for reference and research purposes is permitted, on > condition that acknowledgement of the source and this notice are > included." First, since the frequency can be construed as a fact, and therefore is not copyrightable work of authorship, I'm not particularly concerned by this. [If there is a jurisdiction which does construe mere compendiums of facts as a work of authorship, we could perhaps reconsider this.] Second, the documentation included with the source file seems to indicate that the frequency actually in kanjidic are not Jack Halpern's at all (which anyways were taken from the National Language Research Institute in Tokyo) but "[...] is based on an analysis of word frequencies in the Mainichi Shimbun over 4 years by Alexandre Girardi."[1][2] I suggest that the maintainer adjust the language in debian/copyright to reflect the fact that kanjidic no longer contains the frequency information that was (dubiously) copyrighted by Jack Halpern. Don Armstrong 1: kanjidic_doc.html in kanjidic-2003.07.21. 2: Its worth noting that this conflicts with what is listed in kanjidic.doc, but it seems that the HTML file superceeds the .doc: "Earlier editions [...] used a frequency-of-use ranking [...] interpreted and adapted by Jack Halpern." (From [1]) -- Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows NT (also known as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). -- Matt Welsh http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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