Using Statistic Definitions on a Website:

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Colorado

I am stuck for making a simple definition section for my free educational website. Being a Statistics Minor, I have definitions drilled into my head. I'm scared to use my own definitions as I am sure they are derivative work from one of the books in previous definitions I have learned.

I currently have 3 Statistics text books in front of me.

Example:
Degree of freedom: Number of values that are free to vary after certain restrictions have been imposed on all values.
Source: Elementary Statistics Using the TI83/TI84 calculator second edition, Author: Triola, Page 829.

Degree of freedom: the number of values that are free to vary after a sample statistic has been computed, used, when a distribution (such as the t distribution) consists of a family of curves.
Source: Elemntary Statistics: A Step by Step Approach (Seventh Edition), Author: Bluman, Page 806.

The third books is nearly the same thing.

Now online dictionaries:

degree of freedom : any of the statistically independent values of a sample that are used to determine a property of the sample, as the mean or variance.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.


World English Dictionary
degree of freedom: one of the independent unrestricted random variables constituting a statistic
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

The problem is I could come up with either of the first two definitions on the fly. All of these definitions say the same thing to me. At what point are words common knowledge and the definitions are no longer copyrightable? I am just trying to protect myself. I just want some advise on how I should tackle this. Is there even a database on common knowledge terms?

Thanks you for your time,
Saintseiya

To my knowledge, there is no database of common knowledge words or terms. Common knowledge words, however, would be words that are known by almost everyone - like moon or sun, day or night, mom or dad, food, water, house. These words need no definition to be understood.

Journalists are taught to write using words anyone with an eighth-grade education would commonly understand, this to make the news accessible to all. But when you are writing to a special audience (doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians), you generally address them using the words they work with and understand and are comfortable hearing.

So, common knowledge words will actually depend on the audience that is being addressed. What will be considered common words to you as a statistician will not necessarily be words familiar or common to me or the populace as a whole.

As for dictionary definitions, copyright protects only the creative or unique expression of facts and ideas, but does not protect the facts or ideas themselves. That is why many dictionary definitions will be similar. There are only so many ways in which to define a word. You must use facts in definitions.

Although the particular words chosen for a word definition and the structure of the sentence when putting these words together can help to make a definition copyright-protectable, what is most protectable in a dictionary definition (and with dictionaries as a whole) will be what is included with the definiton to add clarity or interest - the selection of drawings, symbols, idiomatic uses of a word, examples of word usage, the origin of words, synonyms, etc.

With the definitions for your educational website, what you will want to try to do is define your words as concisely as possible using the facts of the word without duplicating exactly the wording of definitions provided elsewhere. This is not always an easy task. One way to do this is to take all that you know about the word and just write your definition without referring to sources. What results is often a phrasing that is different enough from all others to avoid any claim of infringement.

Perhaps most important when you are using definitions, or struggling to come up with your own for your site, will be the copyright law's "fair use" exception. Although certainly a fuzzy exception and hard to define even with a dictionary's help , fair use allows for the limited use of another's copyrighted work, especially when the use is of a nonprofit, noncommercial, educational or research or journalistic nature.

One dictionary definition out of a large dictionary filled with words is unlikely to curtail any profits that may be realized by the maker of the original dictionary (while copying huge sections of a dictionary for use could lead to claims of infringement). And, again, your proposed uses of word definitions on a free educational website is unlikely to spawn a legal action because it is a free educational website. If borrowing heavily from any one source, however, permission should be sought from the copyright holder, along with crediting this source.

As a note, fair use of copyrighted material is a defense to copyright infringement and is not an excuse to use copyrighted material, so you can still be sued even if your use is ultimately declared a fair use by a court. What a court will consider when deciding whether a use is fair or not is the purpose behind using the copyrighted material, the nature of both the new use and the original work, how much of the copyrighted work is used, and if the new use impairs in any way the value of the original work.

With all of that said, the best way to ensure as much as possible that your site does not infringe on anyone else's rights-protected material is to have your proposed site-content as a whole reviewed, prior to publication, by a professional (someone well-versed in publishing law or an intellectual property lawyer).

Good luck.

n-1 .... its your website, use your own definition

I believe, mr. wrongsometimes, that that is exactly what saintseiya is trying to do. His questions concern the how of doing this without infringing on another's rights.