3 ms·
I believe it was settled long ago that mere lists (e.g., telephone directories) with no creative content are not copyrightable in the United States. I'm not fam
by Turing_Machine 3y ago
I believe it was settled long ago that mere lists (e.g., telephone directories) with no creative content are not copyrightable in the United States. I'm not familiar with the Scrabble word lists, but if that's all they are I'd guess they'd fall under that ruling.
Dictionaries, on the other hand, are copyrightable because there's creative work involved in writing the definitions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoI feel like there would be a case to answer if it went to court in the UK, Scrabble words are not an entirely arbitrary selection, nor are they all words in [most] regular dictionaries AFAICT. The list has been curated in order to provide a specific set of rules for a game: there seems to be a creative act of compilation. To say it another way; it's a factual presentation - but the fact (of which words are in the list) was created for the game. This makes it unlike an almanac, say, where the list is dictated by past events. It's perhaps similar to the Guinness Book of Records, where the choice of records to present is creative (along with the usual creative aspects of a book, composition of pages, choice of accompanying images, etc.). One consideration a court might take is that the list cannot be generated without copying from the established Scrabble Dictionary because one otherwise would not know whether to include or exclude any particular word. A list of 'all existing English words of 1-3 letters', say, would be fine though.