On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 20:50, Derek Gladding wrote: > On Wednesday 06 November 2002 05:30 pm, David Turner wrote: > > On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 15:40, Joe Moore wrote: > > > Derek Gladding said: > > > > Hypothetical question... > > > > > > Hypothetical answer below... > > > > > > > If one took a spell-checker, such as Aspell, then: > > > > > > > > - piped the whole of Usenet through it for a couple of weeks > > > > - automatically removed all sequences of characters that failed > > > > - removed all duplicate words from the result > > > > > > > > Would the resulting list of words be a "new" creation, unencumbered by > > > > any license attached to the spell-checker ? ;-) > > > > > > No, this would be a derivative work of the Usenet postings, which are > > > copyright their authors. > > > > > > You'd have to get permission from all Usenet posters. > > > > It would not be a derivative work of Usenet, because the only elements > > copied would be uncopyrightable individual words. > > > > Usenet is, of course, a poor place to get content, because your wordlist > > would be filled with (a) foreign-language messages and spam, (b) made-up > > words like froup and kibo which (probably) shouldn't go into the > > dictionay. > > > > You need another coffee, Novi ;-)
Oh, yeah, I do. > You missed the bit about piping Usenet *through* Aspell to generate a > "different" word-list that just happened to be the same... I guess that's more-or-less the same as the proposal I discussed, just less reliable (nobody's ever used murnival on Usenet, according to Google Groups, but it's in gcide). -- -Dave Turner Stalk Me: 617 441 0668 "Your subsequent comparison of Cornell University with the Ku Klux Klan is probably, umm, a slight exaggeration, but never mind." -John Baez (sci.physics.research)
