What does it mean to license a dictionary?

After all, you can’t really copyright the fact that the French word for “cat” is “chat.” It’s not as though it’s a trademark or something . It’s just a word. But one pair of words does not a dictionary make, nor a database.

It would be easy to determine that someone had lifted a 10-page entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s not just dictionaries of that degree of complexity that are copyrighted. Even cheapo little pocket bilingual dictionaries with nothing more than a one-to-one listing of words, precisely of the cat-chat variety, are copyrighted.

It gets still hairier when you talk about electronic dictionaries (or lexicons, as digital dictionaries tend to be called). Consider the case of the license of this recently released Welsh/English lexicon:

The Welsh Language Board is the owner and/or manager of the copyright; database rights and all other rights pertaining to this database of terms.

Users are only allowed to download lists of terms to the memory of one computer or to translation memories shared across one closed network for their personal use or the sole use of their employers.

It is not permitted to reproduce, copy or publish these list in any form whatsoever without the Board’s prior permission.

If you agree to these conditions, please click on the ‘Accept’ button below.

I find this hard to understand. After all, even using a term from a lexicon subject to such terms seems to violate its copyright. By that (obviously incorrect) reasoning, I shouldn’t be able to repeat the fact that a gyriannau dyfais is a “device driver.”*

Clearly the rights of the people who labored to produce that lexicon should be protected. Anyone who turned around and put their name on that lexicon and sold it as a dictionary would clearly be a plagiarist, and would deserve whatever punishment they got.

(Even so, I think it’s rather ridiculous that an organization like the Welsh Language Board, which ostensibly exists to promote the language, should put such a tool under a restrictive license, particularly when you consider that among the term lists one finds Shop signs and Food menus… domains where any help at all is sorely needed.)

* Shouldn’t that be “device drivers,” anyway?