Are exercises in language books copyrighted?

Question

Good afternoon,

I am working on a language app to learn languages, and I was thinking to include sentences and dialogues for the users to practice their languages.
 My question is: can I re-use, and to what extend, similar exercises used in other textbooks? Does that fall under the fair use for educational purpose?

And more in particular, I am wondering about the following 3 cases:

1. Are vocabulary lists for specific lessons copyrighted? I know a single word (e.g. in Latin) + translation in English is not copyrighted, but what about whole series of words as vocabulary list? E.g.: can I add to the "lesson 1" of my app the vocabulary list at the end of chapter one of a hypothetical book "learn Latin in 20 lessons"?

2. What about dialogues, especially very basic ones, like "What is your name? My name is Paul. Where are you from? I am from Canada"? are they copyrighted? or it depends, and how can I determine the threshold?

3. The app will focus mainly on ancient, dead languages, like Latin. I guess that sentences taken from ancient texts can be used freely as exercises. But what about basic sentences created by the author of a teaching book to illustrate specific examples? Or sentences from the initial exercises, which often are made up to illustrate specific grammatical concepts? Are those sentences copyrighted, or again could I use the sentences of the exercise at the end of chapter one of the same hypothetical book "learn Latin in 20 lessons" ?

Answer 1

Details depend on the juristiction. For that, consult a lawyer if you plan to publish your app anywhere.

But generally, even simple texts from exercises can be covered by copyright. Compare song lyrics, which are not much longer (and might not involve more creative thought than a good exercise ...).

For vocabulary lists, it gets more tricky, but those can be covered as well if the assembly of the list was a creative effort. So if you simply list the 1,000 most common worlds in English and their translation, you are possibly fine, but if the words are divided into units and lessons, that's creative work.

Answer 2

The relevant question is whether the material has a smidgen of intellectual creativity. That is the case with language-teaching dialogues, because they require careful selection to be successful. The typical conventional exchange "Subax wanaagsan. Ma nabad baa?" may be unprotected as an automatic greeting, but after that, significant creativity goes into constructing language dialogues. The component words are (generally) unprotected but the sentences formed from them are. However, the degree of similarity between two works has to reach a certain threshold for there to be a finding of infringement. Because of the nature of the genre, certain kinds of sentences are highly likely to occur in any language lesson ("I ate breakfast"), so infringement would not be found because of the occurrence of such sentences. This is a technical matter where the language experts would testify. Harvesting example sentences from the literature of a dead language is one way to minimize legal risk, as long as you do not recreate authors creative assemblage of sentences harvested from the literature.

The individual words of a word list are not protected, their organization into a series of chapter-vocabularies is. The very act of selecting a word for inclusion in a word list is a creative act and is protected. Dictionaries are protected by copyright. However, especially for dead languages there are many dictionaries in the public domain. But supposing that you wanted to include the 1,000 most useful words in language X and copied that list from a protected work, that would be infringement. Again, the legal question is whether the degree of similarity between two works is substantial (or "striking", "probative" depending on where you are), which again becomes a technical question for the experts to testify to.