Terminology issues I

G'day everyone

I have several questions regarding possible copyright infringement with regard to terminology extraction. There are several issues here, so I'll deal with them one at a time.

1. Terminology extraction isn't copyright infringement (at least, not here in South Africa, where I'm from). You can take a copyrighted work and extract from it the terminology and then publish the terminology as a separate work. If this weren't so, then dictionary writers would have to get someone's permission for each new word they add to the dictionary.

Normally, only a fraction of the words in a book from which terminology is extracted, is used in the terminology database. However, what if I were to extract all words from the work, arrange them in alphabetical order, remove duplicates, remove possible trademark infringements, and publish that? Is that copyright infringement?

I'm inclinde to say that it isn't, because (a) you can't recreate the original work from the extracted terms and (b) you haven't extracted chunks that have their original meaning (in context). For this reason I would think that such a work is not copyright infringement -- it is in fact a new work (it isn't fair use, either).

What say you?

I have deliberately not mentioned the method for extracting the terminology, because that is a separate issue. Let's assume firstly for the above question that the terminology was extracted "in the same medium as the original" (so that a hardcopy book is extracted by hand, or an electronic copy of a book is extracted electronically, etc).

Samuel Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 06:05:45 GMT