[Lexicog] Using old dictionaries

[David Joffe]

> > You cannot copyright the words of a language. So you can use the headwords
> > from a copyrighted dictionary. But you should fix spelling errors, add new
> > words, omit archaic words, etc. Otherwise the copyright owner of the old
> > dictionary might very well complain on moral principles if not legal ones.
> > 
> > You can copyright definitions, example sentences, and other descriptions. If
> > the older dictionary is still in print, you cannot use the descriptions
> > without permission.
> 
> You cannot copyright words, but surely, you can copyright a particular
> selection of headwords, as a collection of data that you yourself
> created and that reflects your particular approach to the description of
> the language at hand.

Again IANAL, but from everything I've seen, you can indeed copyright 
a particular collection of headwords, it is done all the time. 
Annoying as the idea may be to some, it is definitely dangerous 
ground and most probably illegal to be using someone else's headword 
list as a starting point. (It should be intuitively ethically dodgy 
too, because as anyone who's ever done it should know, it isn't easy 
to even get a decent headword list together, it's a lot of work. 
It's a lot of work today, it was even more work back then.)


> In other words, taking over someone's set of headwords alone (in order
> to e.g. provide translations in a language different from the original
> L2) surely does count as copyright infringement, does it not? 

The general consensus I've seen is yes, it would count as copyright 
infringement.

Again, it's better to not even risk it; best just start from scratch 
and know you have all your ducks in a row from the start. There are 
other reasons why old headword lists are less than ideal anyway 
(obsolete words, non-corpus-based etc.).


> Even if you fix spelling errors and possibly remove a subset of
> headwords (e.g. swearwords, proper names, etc.).

Yup.

 - David

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