[Wikipedia-l] Copyright question

Tue Dec 31 21:56:03 UTC 2002

On mar, 2002-12-31 at 13:33, Richard Grevers wrote:
> What is the situation when you want to include information which is 
> essentially in the public domain (e.g. a historical list of the Governors- 
> General of NZ) but where all the convenient sources have their own 
> copyright notices? Are they in effect copyrighting the information (which I 
> would consider to be in the public domain) or just their presentation of 
> it?

At least under US copyright law, _knowledge_ is not copyrightable, just
creative work and presentation. A simple list of governors-general, like
a list of names and telephone numbers in a phone book, is not a
substantial creative work. (There is a particular court case on the
matter; I don't recall but you can probably find it somewhere from 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights )

I can't speak for New Zealand, but I'd be very surprised if knowledge of
historical facts were subject to copyright. Otherwise, you wouldn't be
allowed to mention anything that you heard about on the radio or TV news
or read about in a newspaper without getting written permission and
paying a relicensing fee... ;)

(IANAL)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)