Interesting questions here, Hayden. I took Copyright Law and other IP courses in law school ; I'll try giving your quandries a shot. What is "copying the works of others"? In terms of legality, a decent rule of thumb is to appropriate someone else's creative process for one's own gain is wrong. " If espn.com lists the winners of the Heisman and their school, is copying that information for a bonus unethical? In terms of copyright law, no. Facts themselves are not copyrightable. (Imagine a world where you had to pay someone to publish the fact that Topeka is the capital of Kansas.) "What if a Stark Trek fan site lists all the references in episodes to Shakespeare? Does the fact that they took the time to get that information mean anything? Should the writers be credited in the question?" This isn't quite as cut and dried as a listing of Heisman Trophy Winners, but I don't necessarily think the person has any legal claim against a question writer who appropriates this information. Effort in and of itself does not create copyright protection ; however, here one runs the risk of taking an arrangement of facts and misappropriating them. In an ideal world, question writers would list sources (both for acknowledgement as well as allowing editors to check the source for themselves) but it's sort of time-intensive to do that for every question and I understand why that is generally not standard practice. " What if you go to cdnow.com and get a biography of U2, then rewrite it as a tossup? What if you use only one clue?" It's bad form to cut and paste from a web page entry, and is likely a copyright violation. Fortunately, the nature of QB as we play it generally forces question writers to in some way rearrange the wording, phrasing, and order of such things if nothing else. Specific facts about U2 are non-copyrightable ; the words someone else might use to express them are copyrightable. " What if you go to the Archive, find two questions on Bach, and combine them?" Again, the literal facts about Bach are not copyrightable. However, I think this is bad form for a variety of reasons. It may reward someone who has heard (or written) the same string of words before in a Bach question and/or may be replicating another writer's factual error. Whether or not the copying rises to the level of copyright violation, I wouldn't recommend this. -Tim Young (Esq.) :)
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