Re: [aspell-devel] New Bengali Dictionary Ready But Author Does Not Want to Release ...

[Brian Nelson]

Kevin Atkinson <address@hidden> writes:

> Of course I want him to release the list, but I do not know what to tell 
> him to get him to do so.  I told him that he can release he dictionary 
> under a GPL license.  However, it would still be easy for others to 
> incorporated the word list in there spell-checker.  And if they did it 
> would be difficult to proved that they did.  Thus I can not really address 
> his concern.
>
> If anyone has anything to say to him that might convince him to release 
> the Dictionary please let me know.  I will forward it to him.

It's probably worth noting that under US copyright law, a wordlist is
not copyrightable, so it would make no sense to release it under the GPL
or any other license.  It simply isn't possible to copyleft a dictionary
in the US--it's basically public domain.

However, under EU copyright law, it *is* possible to copyright
wordlists.  Even so, a US individual/company could take the wordlist and
do whatever they like.  I'm not aware of any countries outside the EU
that would have any sort of copyrights for wordlists.

I don't know what country the author is from, or what country the
companies he/she fears is from, and what the copyright laws are like
there.  Regardless, if the wordlist was released, at least a good chunk
of the world would be able to do whatever they'd like with the list and
the author would have no legal clout with which to stop them.

It's not a very convincing argument, but the author doesn't really have
any options available.  At least you could it would go both ways, and
the author could take wordlists from the companies (depending on local
copyright laws anyway).

IANAL, of course...

-- 
Blast you and your estrogenical treachery!