Hey JGO,
I’m currently developing a game which involves a list of words in the English language. Specifically, this is the list I plan on using: http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/wordlists/english/ (wordsEn.txt)
Am I allowed to use and distribute this list with a commerical game? Just want to make sure so I don’t get sued 
I’m not a lawyer and laws vary country to country, but I’m pretty sure that a word list is not copyright-able.
I don’t know whether they are copyrighted, so why not mention that you downloaded the lists from that link somewhere in the credits section of the game?
You can not copyright words or numbers.
What you can copyright is phrases and sequences of numbers (for say, mathematical theory or algorithms). Check your local legislation for clarification.
Like in the UK here are a few of the laws regarding “words” or literature:
Protected by copyright law:
Lyrics, programs (software/games), commercial documents, leaflets, newsletters, articles and many more
This is a quick list off Google, there is many more. However feel safe that you can not be sued for using a word from the dictionary, be aware of made up words or hipster type chat (like using YOLO) as some ass will come along and say “Hey I made that word up, that is my intellectual property!”.
Thanks for the replies,
I’m not so concerned about using a word from the dictionary, more so about the specific list of words which was put together by some person or company who may have the rights to it.
And yes I will mention the list in the credits, but I’m not sure if that’s enough to get by any potential copyrights.
If you could copyright all words in English language, you could copyright English language itself, which means that everyone speaking, writing, or reading something in English, could be sued for virtually any amount of money. But you can’t do that. Also, the file didn’t contain any copyright notice, so I think you can use it. I’m not sure, however. I’m not a lawyer, so there’s a very high chance of me being incorrect.
A copyright notice is not required for a work to have copyright. Copyright is a right. If the word list creator said that the work was a poem, there would be no question it falls under copyright. A work like Finnegan’s Wake barely follows the rules of grammar and includes many non words, but it was copyrighted. A dictionary is a list of words and is copyrighted. So I would say any arbitrary collection of words is copyrighted.
For extra credit: shuffle the list. Does it still fall under the original copyright? I think not 
Check out their Terms of Service. From that page:
[quote]The resources found on the SIL International website are intended for non-commercial scholarly research and educational use. You may make copies of these publications for research or educational purposes in accordance with the SIL Fair Use Guidelines free of charge and without further permission.
Republication or commercial use of anything on the SIL International website (unless stated otherwise) is expressly prohibited without the written consent of SIL International.
[/quote]
So it seems that yes, those word lists are protected under their terms of service. What would happen if you violated those terms is unclear. But if you’re worried about it, why not contact them and get permission to use the list?
Agreed. Friedly asking is always a good thing to start with.
Also, I highly doubt that even if anybody would really want to sue you for using it (which is already rather improbable), it is even more improbable that anybody will ever notice that you used it…
However, not trying to convince you to break copyright…
I have three independent points to make:
Don’t trust legal advice from unqualified strangers.
If you’re based in the EU, you need to worry about “database rights” in addition to copyright.
There are word lists which have been explicitly released into the public domain: e.g. http://wordlist.aspell.net/12dicts-readme/
Cheers for sharing the public domain word list, much appreciated
Oh, but you can copyright numbers. And people do all the time. Every time a bit of code is copyrighted, they are essentially just copyrighting a very large number, as it’s essentily nothing but a string of 0s and 1s. You can also trademark numbers for specific uses, such as Boeing and their 737.
Well it doesnt mean anything.
Anyone can copyright, patent, trademark “anything” but it’s not enforced, YOU have to sue and then it has to hold up in court.
On the other hand it also comes down to legal muscle of course. Something like Google vs. Oracle is massive, and there was actually a company making “IPhones” before Apple and the sued Apple. But being a smaller companies they just got buried by Apple in legal fees.
So anyway:
It depends a bit on the place where you live. In Germany you cannot actively “copyright” something. If you created it, you have author rights, which work like copyright (and often are called) copyright, but it doesn’t need any action except the act of creation. You also cannot pass it to someone else - you can only pass usage rights, but you will always stay author.
Patents - actually patents were meant to protect inevtions and therefore the thing to be patented needs to be something new, a step beyond the existing. How big the step must be to justify a patent, it differs in deifferent areas of the world, but the idea is the same. You cannot patent something which isn’t new. Patent offices are there to check this (well, they should …)
There are also registered designs. Unlike patents they must not be particularly advanced, just unique. At least in my home country you can register these for a fee without any need to show some novelty löike patents require. These still give good protection to your design - no one else is allowed to use this design while your registration lasts. Fairly small modifications are often enough to circumvent this protection, though.
Trademarks, here you are right, you can trademark about anything that is used to label something. This can include but is not limited to colors, shapes, words and numbers.
Trademarks are difficult to defend though if they do not describe a well known product. E.g. the word “windows” was just a word initially, and in the very early days of MS Windows a competitor might have challended the trademark successfully. Once established, it now is easy to defend.
But IANAL and each country has different laws …
There’s a lot of misinformation in this thread. Anybody reading it should take everything with a grain of salt.
Can you point out some of the misinformation? Maybe I’m misinformed myself and would like to know better. So I’m asking, just in case it was something in my posting that is wrong.
Long discussion, kept short:
Yes well, theoretically. In practice that isn’t so at all anymore. First of all nothing is completely “new” anyway, unless you got your zero point energy device or cold fusion.
Secondly the patent office doesnt have to and couldnt check if you invention actually works. So you submit a schematic, concept or whatever and they dont verify if it works or anything; thereby making many patent moot to begin with.
Again don’t trust random people on the internet, however, I am German as well and took some copyright and media law classes, and I can verify this is exactly how it works in Germany and SHOULD work the same or similar in most 1st world countries.
Which actually baffled me, that the author (while alive) is legally unable to make something he created public domain. Only licensing would be possible.
Flip-side of the coin is similar: One can sue anyone for anything. Doesn’t mean it has a legal basis.
I feel like one pertinent example in this thread would be Bethesda’s lawsuit against Mojang for announcing a game called “Scrolls” because of their trademarked franchise “Elder Scrolls”.
Was settled outside of court probably because Bethesda was begging Mojang.
I was meaning that you can’t directly copyright a single number or word lol.
The issue lies in human interpretation of arbitrary things, considering them ‘similar’ from a certain perspective.
A sequence of bits is can be considered ‘similar’ to another, completely different sequence of bits. E.g.: using 2 image formats to encode the same image (say: JPG and PNG). Any judge will consider them practically identical and will rule the case a copyright infrigement.
You cannot strip away abstraction layers, like stating a program can be expressed as a copyrightable big number. There are near-infinite ‘similar’ programs with incomparable bit sequences, which all fall under the copyright of the original program.
The contrary is also true: there are possibly identical ‘big numbers’ that don’t come close to resembling bits of a program, because it’s, say, a bunch of atoms in a rock in a peculiar pattern. Odds are tiny, n = huge.
Copyright and patents are all about conceptual similarities, while retaining abstraction layers and context. What is deemed similar depends on who you’d ask, which is why we have lawsuits about it in the first place, because the parties disagree on whether A and B are similar.
My two cents: Making up an original word list, or even adding enough variation to avoid any issues (as in borrow a few words here and there, but really make up your own), should not be too hard.