[PauloWerneck]

Commenting the discussion between Dimm and others about copyright and dictionaries, a wish to say that I love dictionaries and I plenty of them in Portuguese (my mother language). When I search a word in two or three of them, I usually get some identical phrases in two or all of them, and none is said to have violated copyrights.

Any dictionarist uses other's dictionaries and books and whatever to make their's dictionaries. What makes one dictionary distinct from another is the quantity of words, the quantity of meanings for each word and the word selection.

This is why I am using mainly the Webster's Revised Unabridged, 1913 Edition as a companion to reading Patrick O'Brian's novels, and why OneLook and Linguee are so helpful: there are plenty of words too technical and in desuse, that are more easy to find in 1913 Edition, in the meaning used in the book, otherwise Onelook will point me all online dictionaries in which the word are to be found, otherwise Linguee will point texts in English were the word occurs as well as their traductions, otherwise I will have to find other means to get the meaning of the word...

So, I think quite difficult to deal with the question of copyright in making dictionaries, unless one just copies all the entries of another.