Hello
I wanted to ask you that I am making a website and I want to make a list of birthday of sports players for each day. Ia it permissible to find out the birthdays from wikipedia and then put it on my website? Does this come under copyright infringement? Also, if I am just getting info about a certain topic and am not copying it, is using that info copyright infringement too?
For Example, how many times did Roger Federer beat Novak Djokovic. I will go to ATP’s site and see the head to head and then put it in my article.
I don’t think you can copyright a fact such as someones birthday. Wikipedia cannot have the sole rights to write John Smith - 25th December 2006, or whatever. It’s just a name and date, you could have got that from birth records or anywhere else. Date is a set of standard formats that wiki doesn’t have any ownership over.
Same as a sporting result. It is a fact Roger Federer beat Novak Djokovic X amount of times. They don’t own that fact.
If they wrote a big biog about the person or a sports report and you copied it all then they could get funny about it.
If that isn’t the case 99.99% of websites are infringing someones copyright by mentioning pretty much anything. I wouldn’t be able to write Ford produced the Ford Focus from 1998 or the sun is powered by nuclear fusion. Wiki certainly doesn’t own the rights to either.
The information that appears on Wikipedia is supposed to be free of copyright.
What will remain depends upon whether the content is free of copyright restrictions…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
Copyright laws do vary from country to country, but I think if you are collating facts that are freely available and presenting them in your own unique way, there should be no problem.
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That means anything subject to someone else’s copyright will be deleted - it doesn’t mean they are not claiming copyright on what is left there (in those circumstances where they can).
If you are publishing information that is PUBLIC, you are not subject to copyright infringement. However…if you are monetizing your site using this information, you are then open to infringment issues. Most celebrity/entratainment/sports players have their name and anything to do with their name and image either under copright or trademark. As long as your site is not monetized using their information you shouldn’t have any problems.
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