Can I develop open source software to parse a copyrighted document for private use?
<p>I obtained a foreign language dictionary in PDF format, whose copyright information states the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owners and the publisher of this book.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Would it be in violation of the above copyright to do the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Produce open source software that parses or analyzes freely available text using the data in the dictionary <em><strong>without providing the dictionary data (PDF) itself</strong></em></li>
<li>Include, as part of the software, the means for storing entries from the dictionary, <em><strong>so long as the stored data is never made publicly available, and is restricted to private, individual, domestic use</strong></em></li>
</ul>
<p>In short, do I have the right to produce software which would make available the means to use the PDF's dictionary data, including storing it, but which would also never make such data available to the user and would require them to obtain the copyrighted document themselves?</p>

<h2 id="yes-r2t9">Yes</h2>
<p>Providing you can do all this without ever copying the dictionary or making a translation of it.</p>
<p>So, for example, if this dictionary was made available by the author online and you queried it (through an API or otherwise) that would not infringe copyright because no copy is being made. However, if you made a copy and stored it on your own server for this purpose, that would be a violation.</p>

copyright software open-source-software