What kind of copyright issues can arise for a dictionary app/software?

[Rakanoth]

We are working on a multilingual dictionary app that takes definitions from various dictionaries online and presents them to the user. I won't get into the specific details about what this app does it differently than others. The innovative part of the dictionary is its user interface. We believe it is going to be extremely useful to a lot of people. The languages include English to English (as in oxford or cambridge dictionary) as well as English to German, German to English. 

The problem is that our app will either scrape the definitions from online dictionaries' website (via regex or DOM/xpath/xquery) or receive the definitions from an API and store the definitions. So, the definitions of the terms/word won't be ours. We can "maybe" call them "stolen". What kind of copyright issues if:

1.) we make the project open source and publish it?

2.) we sell it as an app?

[Nayr438]

Depends on where your pulling it from, however chances are they will be able to go after you for something if your not licensing it in some form.

If its open-source non commercial software, chances are you can probably work out a a deal to freely use there data, Dictionary.com hints at a possibility in there terms. You may have to come to a agreement on how your project will be licensed as well.

Dictionary.com for example include this in there Terms of service.

Quote

• You will not violate any applicable law, contract, intellectual property right or other third-party right or commit a tort, and you are solely responsible for your conduct while using our Services. You will not:
  • Engage in any harassing, threatening, intimidating, predatory or stalking conduct;
  • Use or attempt to use another user’s account without authorization from that user and Dictionary;
  • Impersonate any person or entity or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;
  • Sell, resell or commercially use our Services;
  • Copy, reproduce, distribute, publicly perform or publicly display all or portions of our Services, except as expressly permitted by us or our licensors;
  • Modify our Services, remove any proprietary rights notices or markings, or otherwise make any derivative works based upon our Services;
  • Use our Services other than for their intended purpose and in any manner that could interfere with, disrupt, negatively affect or inhibit other users from fully enjoying our Services or that could damage, disable, overburden or impair the functioning of our Services in any manner;
  • Reverse engineer any aspect of our Services or do anything that might discover source code or bypass or circumvent measures employed to prevent or limit access to any part of our Services;
  • Use any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods designed to scrape or extract data from our Services;
  • Develop or use any applications that interact with our Services without our prior written consent;
  • Send or distribute spam, unsolicited or bulk commercial electronic communications, chain letters, or pyramid schemes;Bypass or ignore instructions contained in our robots.txt file; or
  • Use our Services for any illegal or unauthorized purpose, or engage in, encourage or promote any activity that violates these Terms.

 

My advise is to send out a request to sites you plan to pull data from and ask for their written consent to use their work.

[minibois]

I don't have much to add to the discussion here, as yes you should definitely check with the dictionaries you'll want to retrieve information from.

Maybe they have a way to license definitions, or maybe it's even free if it's for non-profit/educational use.

 

What I do wonder about is if there are ways for these dictionaries to see you copied them.

Some time ago I saw a video by Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper Jones in their 'Map men' series which covered so called "trap streets" in maps. These were streets on a map that didn't exist, that were added to the maps intentionally. The idea is that the user of the map wouldn't be inconvenienced by these streets (as they often are just small streets added in insignificant places), but they were a way for mapmakers to see if other maps had copied them, because these trap streets would not be seen in real life; they would only be seen and added by someone copying that map.

 

A dictionary could have such "traps" too, perhaps in the form of a fake word added, or something misspelled.

Although on the other hand I doubt they'd have something like a misspelling or fake word, as that would hurt the integrity of the dictionary.

 

Video link by the way:

Spoiler

 

 

[akio123008]

17 minutes ago, minibois said:

A dictionary could have such "traps" too, perhaps in the form of a fake word added, or something misspelled

I think the problem with that would be that the definitions of other words would still be taken from these websites so they could still get you for using those definitions without permission. 

 

In other words, I suspect adding a fake word isn't as similar to adding a fake street to a map, it's more like adding a fake map to a book that contains a collection of other people's maps. 

[Teddy07]

A company should not have to ask on a internet forum for legal advice. It won´t end well

[TetraSky]

4 hours ago, Rakanoth said:

1.) we make the project open source and publish it?

2.) we sell it as an app?

Nope to both.

 

Definitions are "unique" to each dictionaries and thus protected by copyright.

Most/All of them even include fake ones to catch people who would steal their content.

 

You would need to rewrite each definitions a bit. Else it's copyright infringement. 

[BuckGup]

Don't you usually figure these things out before development starts? It could lead to being too complex and costly to be a viable solution 

[Wheresmehammer]

Here is my new game named Colgate, you skate on toothpaste tubes.

[Guest]

Might as well make your own dictionary at that point.