Timeline for Is a list of the most common English words copyrightable under US law?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
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| Oct 9, 2019 at 18:38 | comment | added | David Richerby |
@asgallant "The sequence of most common English words is the output of a well-defined algorithm". So is any novel: print "Once upon a time, [...]". More significantly, the input to the algorithm you allude to is unclear. Now, I'm not claiming that the list is copyrightable, but the idea that you can I could both run the same procedure and would necessarily come up with the same answer isn't really true.
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| Oct 9, 2019 at 14:14 | comment | added | Martin Bonner supports Monica | @Acccumulation SCOTUS only has jurisdiction over the USA. If you only consider UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, that still leaves SCOTUS with jurisdiction over only about 70% of the English speaking jurisdictions weighted by population. I don't really think that counts as "vast majority". | |
| Oct 9, 2019 at 7:13 | comment | added | gnasher729 | I’d like to see the “well-defined” algorithm to create a list of the 1,000 most used English words. | |
| Oct 9, 2019 at 4:09 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Oct 12, 2019 at 11:23 | |||||
| Oct 8, 2019 at 18:53 | comment | added | David Schwartz | @james Since Feist, the US has no "sweat of the brow" doctrine anymore. More importantly, in the US you cannot violate the copyright of a work you did not access. Ten people who independently create even precisely the same work are all entitled to copyright it. | |
| Oct 8, 2019 at 18:02 | comment | added | ilkkachu | @asgallant, also, "the" (as in the one and only) sequence of most common words probably doesn't even exist -- even the Wikipedia page has two sets of ranks. Plus a mention of the fact that a similarly-written word may have two different meanings, and that might be taken into account (or not). An algorithm to identify the different meanings of a single word probably isn't that trivial. | |
| Oct 8, 2019 at 14:11 | comment | added | james | Many jurisdictions, including the US, have a concept of "sweat of the brow" (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow ), which would apply here, but didn't in the cited case. The basic idea being that if something requires significant effort to create, then the product of that work intrinsically attracts property rights, and is thence copyrightable. | |
| Oct 8, 2019 at 9:04 | comment | added | Chris H | @asgallant selection of an appropriate corpus to point your algorithm at is a non-trivial (in an academic sense - I don't know enough about the legal sense) task; if that's done by algorithm, you have a non-trivial algorithm | |
| Oct 8, 2019 at 0:14 | comment | added | Acccumulation | @Delioth My comment was disputing the idea that there's only 0.5% chance that the OP is asking about the US. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 23:25 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @JörgWMittag its actually relevant to 4% of the world's population or 27% of the developed world | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 22:23 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | @asgallant: You are correct, that this list is probably not copyrighted anywhere. It might however be protected under database protection in several jurisdictions, including in Germany and in fact the entire EU. Even though the question explicitly asks about copyright only, I would consider any answer that doesn't mention database protection incomplete, just like I would consider any answer that doesn't mention that this depends entirely on the jurisdiction incomplete. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 20:02 | comment | added | dotancohen | Regarding "any jurisdiction with a reasonable definition of copyright", in fact, I'm not aware of any jurisdiction with what I would consider a reasonable definition nor implementation of copyright. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 19:21 | comment | added | Delioth | @Acccumulation Which Supreme Court? There's at least a few, and there's nothing that says this question is about English law (only about the use of lists of English words - for all we know it could be comparative research taking place in Thailand comparing most used English words to Korean words), and this site has users all around the world. I mean, in all likelyhood it's about US law since the Questioner's profile says they're in the US, but it's silly to assume US-centric for all questions on the site. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 17:39 | comment | added | Acccumulation | @JörgWMittag While your comment has some validity, the Supreme Court is controlling in the vast majority of jurisdictions, weighted by how likely someone would be asking, on an English language website, what the law regarding English words is. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 16:18 | comment | added | asgallant | The sequence of most common English words is the output of a well-defined algorithm, not a creative work. It's hard to see how any jurisdiction with a reasonable definition of copyright would protect that list. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 11:10 | comment | added | alephzero | "The list-maker didn't create the words" is beside the point.Few people would try to argue that a novel is not copyright because the writer did not create any of the words in it. The arrangement of the words (and whether or not that is "trivial" and/or "common knowledge") is the important point. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 10:47 | comment | added | Jörg W Mittag | You seem to assuming one particular jurisdiction without ever naming which one. Also, it is not clear why you assume that this particular jurisdiction is the one and only, considering that the OP has not named any particular jurisdiction. In particular, in 99.5% of all jurisdictions, the reference you cited is completely und utterly irrelevant. | |
| Oct 7, 2019 at 1:06 | vote | accept | NK1406 | ||
| Oct 9, 2019 at 2:02 | |||||
| Oct 7, 2019 at 0:07 | history | answered | user6726 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |