From Who Owns Scrabble’s Word List?[1]: "Dictionaries enjoy copyright protection for two main reasons: Their creators make judgments about what words to includ

From Who Owns Scrabble’s Word List?[1]: "Dictionaries enjoy copyright protection for two main reasons: Their creators make judgments about what words to include, and entries feature definitions and other original material. (Just last week, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled against[2] a plaintiff who wanted to copy and repurpose the bulk of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, including definitions, for his own dictionary.) But in 1991, in Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.[3], the Supreme Court decided that a phone company wasn’t entitled to a copyright on its white pages. That’s because the list of names and numbers lacked an important requirement: originality." [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2014/09/major_scrabble_brouhaha_can_you_copyright_a_list_of_words.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2014/09/major_scra... [2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/241384392/Richards-v-Webster http://www.scribd.com/doc/241384392/Richards-v-Webster [3] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1195336269698056315&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1195336269698056...