KFL@ai.ai.mit.edu (Keith F. Lynch) (03/13/86)
Suppose I wanted to market a spelling checker. For this I need a list of all common words. I have been wondering where I can get one for free and with no copyright restrictions. It occurred to me that if I were to go through many megabytes of mailing list archives and seperate out all the words, put them in order, removing duplicates, manually filtering out hostnames, personal names, and misspelled words, I would have a file useful for spelling checking, text compression, and text encryption. My question is, is this legal? I am not sure whether the archives are copyrighted or not, but even if they are, individual words stripped out and seperated from all context surely aren't, right? Please reply to me, I am not on this list. ...Keith