Comments on: Are bibliographies copyrightable? – the German case http://openbiblio.net/2011/07/13/are-bibliographies-copyrightable-the-german-case/ Open Bibliographic Data Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation Wed, 26 Nov 2014 08:29:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.1 By: Adrian Pohl http://openbiblio.net/2011/07/13/are-bibliographies-copyrightable-the-german-case/#comment-272 Mon, 18 Jul 2011 07:48:33 +0000 http://openbiblio.net/?p=1248#comment-272 Hello Sylvia,

it seems to me that you are talking about specialized bibliographies which are published in form of a monograph or database. To be clear: The post doesn’t say anything about these, it only covers bibliographies/reference lists which normally form the last part of a scholarly text and display the sources referenced in this text.

As such reference lists are only aggregations of all sources referenced in a text no extra intellectual work goes into creating them and thus they aren’t copyrightable.

Adrian

]]> By: Sylvia Morris http://openbiblio.net/2011/07/13/are-bibliographies-copyrightable-the-german-case/#comment-266 Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:25:43 +0000 http://openbiblio.net/?p=1248#comment-266 I’m not an expert, but I’ve dealt a lot with copyright issues over the years and I would say that a bibliography was copyright. It has after all to be created using intellectual effort. I believe that even databases like library catalogues are covered by copyright.
The author who created the bibliography would be the copyright-holder as for other created works, but I wouldn’t expect an author to put any barrier in the way of anybody wanting to copy it (except in the case of plagiarism)

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