For smaller languages the steps would be:
- Somebody would have to digitize an old book without mistakes.
- Somebody would have to publish it online.
- Somebody would have to scrape and archive that.
- Somebody would have to transliterate it to Latin script.
- That transliteration would also have be the same transliteration I'm using.
It's unlikely it will be done for a lot of languages.
> There's easier schemes that don't rely on that.
Remembering random words is hard. This is how we got into this in the first place.
> But I’d be shocked if it’s legal anywhere to release a product that competes with what you work on at your job.
That happens everyday. In fact most companies are found by people who already work in the industry. You simply should not steal trade secrets, copyright or patents.
It's about the cost of credit. References are free in academia. In music crediting means paying royalties. In academia the assumption is that citing is fair use up to a point (a paragraph? a page?). Since songs are much shorter, the window for "fair use" is also much shorter (5 seconds? 10 seconds?).
It's unlikely it will be done for a lot of languages.
> There's easier schemes that don't rely on that.
Remembering random words is hard. This is how we got into this in the first place.