Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12979
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> 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?

Original score: 7