copyright derivative-work
Are lone excerpts considered derivative works?
<p>Specific context:</p>
<ul>
<li>I am in the United States as is the owner of the work.</li>
<li>The work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0</li>
</ul>
<p>Someone has digitized a public domain reference dictionary and posted it on the internet under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. It is in a format where the entire contents of the dictionary are in a single web page.</p>
<p>I would like to make a searchable version of this dictionary (it is very hard to navigate in a single web page). In this case, I would be providing a web page that contains a search bar, and the results would be unmodified excerpts from the original digitized version corresponding to the entry being requested.</p>
<p>Does this break the terms of CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0?</p>

<p>If we subtract the public domain aspect of the situation, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode" rel="noreferrer">CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 means</a> that you may not &quot;Share&quot; any &quot;Adapted Materials&quot;. Share means what you think it means: you can adapt materials for yourself, you cannot share (redistribute) that adaptation. &quot;Adapted materials&quot; is material &quot;translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor&quot;. No you may not, if you are talking about material protected by copyright.</p>
<p>Material that is simply digitized does not gain copyright protection from being digitized, see <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/36/191/2413183/" rel="noreferrer">Bridgeman v. Corel</a>. So if a work was un-creatively digitized and was in the public domain, then it does not become re-protected by the act of scanning. However, if the work was creatively digitized, even minimally, then that new work <em>is</em> protected by copyright.</p>
