Re: word lists

[Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>]

>> let's assume that I take the first volume of `Harry Potter' and do
>> the following: […]
>
> This forum is a resource for discussing the legal issues of actual or
> potential Debian packages.
>
> Unless you are discussing a proposed package for Debian based on
> Harry Potter, please don't speculate on hypotheticals about parsing
> copyright law here.

Thanks for your grumpy answer.

Yes, this is about a potential package, namely a word list of
hyphenated German words; see

  http://repo.or.cz/w/wortliste.git

Actually, recent German hyphenation patterns for TeX and related
software are based on this list, so I'm not that far away from the
guideline you are giving above – maybe there even exists a Debian
package for this list already, I don't know.

I have some fundamental questions regarding word lists not answered
elsewhere AFAICS, so my speculations have good reasons.  Admittedly,
my first e-mail was a bit pointy and short, not giving enough
background.

To formulate the issue in a broader way:

  (1) What happens with the copyright of works if I extract
      information as explained in my previous mail?

  (2) What copyright can a word list have at all, given that it gets
      mechanically extracted?  This is a very important question for
      us.  The `difficult' part on the side of the list creator was
      collecting the input data, for example, leeching as much English
      texts from the internet as possible, thus touching issue (1).
      The list itself then gets created with a few lines of scripting.

  (3) The frequency of words is a statistical information, a byproduct
      of collecting the data mechanically, without any manual
      intervention.  Can such information be copyrighted, too?
      
  (3) What license do you recommend for a list of German words (as in
      our project) enriched with information on weighted hyphenation
      points?  Contrary to (2) and (3), we enter our information
      manually, however, it's just describing inherent properties of
      German words.


    Werner