Is it legal to share an index you made from someone else's book?
There are some books published without a back-of-book index, which I feel is a dreadful shame. As part of my research I decided to create an index of one such book. Doing so is legal for my own use, and would be illegal (I guess) if I tried to sell copies...but what if I shared the new index on a website, or gave printed copies away for free?
For a book that is 'out of copyright' in my country then I guess this is allowed? What if the book is not in the public domain? I assume we have to look at the 4 'fair use' guidelines?
I haven't copied anything verbatim from the original book, just individual words. I haven't detracted from the book's sales or rivalled the publisher's business in any way. I am not making a profit. I'm doing this for scholarly reasons. I'm a complete amateur at indexing and am not trying to showcase my skills in order to get hired.
However, you could argue that the magnitude of my act somehow encompasses the entirety of the original book. Perhaps the author/publisher would feel annoyed that I'd somehow usurped their authority in some way? Am I on safe ground?
Can you argue my usage was "transformative" enough to go beyond being a copy?
(I could ask the copyright holder's permission, but let us imagine they are impossible to track down, or that I end up with 100 such indexes to share.)
You cannot give me legal advice, of course, but has anyone seen a similar situation which helps shed light on this grey area? Or heard about something along the same lines in another industry? I'm in the UK but am interested in answers about the US situation too.
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has anyone seen a similar situation which helps shed light on this grey area?
I have in front of me two publications: Common LISP: The Language, by Guy Steele (et al.) and published by Digital Press, and Common LISP: The Index, by Rosemary Simpson and published by Coral Software Corp and Franz Inc. Both were published in the US in the 1980s. I was fairly active in the LISP community at the time and I didn't hear a ruckus about that index — just cheering.
It is possible that the two publishers cooperated (the cover design of the index is clearly derived from the original book), but I don't know. There is no acknowledgment section in the index.
Since the index doesn't reuse content from the original I don't see how it could infringe. I offer this one example where somebody did exactly that without apparent repercussions.
Is it legal?
I am not a lawyer and you should consult one rather than just trusting people on the Internet. That said, another answerer argues that an index infringes copyright because it is "an exact duplicate of single words from another work", and I dispute that claim.
Words cannot be copyrighted. Even book titles cannot be copyrighted, as demonstrated by the number of duplicate and mostly-overlapping titles out there, so surely single words cannot be. (If you invented the word you might be able to pursue a trademark, but that's different. And rare, within the domain of things you might want to put into an index.) Using words like "iterator" and "class" and "inheritance" in an index does not infringe the rights of the person who wrote the programming book you're indexing; if it did, then using those words in contexts other than an index would also infringe, yet we see many many books on the same topics and no record of the person who got there first successfully suing the others. Conclusion: either this is legal or there is a vast untapped market of prospective, successful lawsuits that lawyers have routinely ignored. Which do you think more likely?
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I think if you create and publish an index to the copyrighted work of another person you are infringing on their copyright.
Basically what you are doing is using their work to create a derivative work, similar to making a movie of a novel.
Also you should note that giving your index away for free does not.change anything. If you made a movie from one of Stephen King's novels and gave away the DVDs for free you'd still have broken the law.
Make sure you ask a lawyer.
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