User talk:Magnus Manske/Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians

Our article Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians links to "1900 edition at archive.org", however going to that page and clicking through to the text version gives: [1], which appears to the the fifth edition from 1958!? Wouldn't that still be copyrighted?

As far as I'm concerned, archive.org says it's the 1900 version, and that's good enough for me :-) Besides, I'm using only a subset of the names, not all the names or the descriptions. I am uncertain that, even if the text is copyrighted, this sublist is. It might be fair use, or even PD (you can't copyright people's names, now can you?). So, if someone complains, I'll take it down, otherwise I'll leave it for the time being. --Magnus Manske 16:19, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Seems reasonable, especially given questionable copyrightability of the list—Baker's has a pretty explicit editorial policy of trying to be as comprehensive as possible, not of creatively selecting names, and comprehensive lists (like phone books) aren't copyrightable. I'm curious about the copyright status though; how is archive.org getting away with displaying it? The only way the 1958 edition could be PD is if its copyright wasn't renewed, and since Slonimsky was continuously the editor from 1958 through 1992 and it was a major commercial concern I can't believe they would've failed to renew the copyright. We should be cautious therefore about taking the article text verbatim or creating articles by paraphrasing the Baker's one too closely (doing that from the Google Books 1919 scan is perfectly fine, but note that there were a lot of birth/death date errors in the 1919 edition, so cross-ref those with the 1958 edition). --Delirium 21:01, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, sorry Magnus, I think my comment came across the wrong way. I wasn't thinking of whether your list extraction was a copyright problem (I'm sure it's not), I was thinking that sadly we couldn't cut'n'paste content from that edition to use as a starting point for any articles about the musicians, as was done with e.g. the 1911 Brittanica. --Stormie 22:52, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm probably a bit late in the day on this, but I suspect that the 1958 date may be correct, at least as regards the list to which this discussion page is appended, as it includes pianist Ray Lev, who wasn't born until 1912 and was most active as a pianist in the 1930s and 1940s. Drhoehl (talk) 02:48, 19 May 2009 (UTC)