I'm working on an app to practice vocabulary. I have a few books at home that teach the language and naturally contain a list of vocabulary at the end of the book. For convenience, I'd like to copy those lists into the app, so that users that are working with the respective book can just import that list and do not need to copy it themselves.
This related post explains that words of a language itself are not copyrightable, but a list for a purpose is. That answer is lacking a region tag though.
This post has the somewhat same question, but is about copying definitions from a dictionary (and again no region tag). I'm not talking about definitions, I'm simply taking about a list like
voiture: car
Apfelbaum, der: apple tree
punainen: red
Most books orientate themselves to the levels of the CEFR. A1 would be an absolute beginner and C2 would be equivalent to a native speaker.
For example, the above link desribes A1 as
Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.
As such it is no wonder, that most books for specific levels have a large amount of overlapping vocabulary.
My questions are:
is it legal to publish a copied list from a book
- if not, to what degree must it be different (aka, maybe I can not name the list "Chapter 1 of Language book 1", but it can match 95% of the vocabulary)
can a user upload such a list for personal use to the server?
can I make a user's uploaded list available for other users?
In my mind these questions are highly related, but please tell me if I should ask them in separate threads.