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Congress Again Considering Database Protection Bill
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo News is reporting on a new bill in Congress: '... a proposed bill that would prevent wholesale copying of school guides, news archives and other databases which do not enjoy copyright protection.'" The idea of database protection legislation has been kicking around for a long time. It's a bad idea, but it would make a lot of money for a few companies, so they keep pushing it, and no doubt will eventually get it passed.
It's the ongoing battle of special interests vs general or diffuse interest. On the whole, the general interest of the population to be able to copy databases is probably worth more than the money that a few companies can make from copyrighting them.
Let's say (to pull some numbers out of the air) that DB copying is worth about $1 apiece to everyone in the country (total nearly $300M), but only $50M apiece to three companies to prevent it. $300M beats $150M, right?
Alas, those three companies might be willing to put up $1M each ($3M) in lobbying efforts, but only a tiny fraction of the general population would be willing to give up the 1 cent each to match that (besides which, overhead on trying to collect that would kill it).
Thus the political power tends to accrue to the special interests -- however diverse those special interests might be -- to the detriment of the general interest.
-- Alastair
I find it rediculous when companies try to charge for access to their news archives (eg: nytimes). For the most part, the only articles that are of interest to anyone are those that are from the current edition. The current articles are mainly read for pleasure. I can understand paying for that.
However, old articles are only of interest to people doing research. I can think of no single activity that advances civilization faster than research. Research leads to understanding, which leads to improvements on old ideas. I believe that any time someone has the desire to research something, that desire shouldn't be hindered in any way. Access to databases of old news articles should be free.
because telemarketers calling during dinner became a problem that affected politicians directly. Problems that don't affect them directly and immediately are largely ignored (eg: microsoft's monopoly, the riaa as acting as a governmen-sanctioned vigilante, air pollution, inner-city crime, etc)
Why can't current law apply. If a database contains original authored work and isn't just a big grab of available data from many sources, why shouldn't existing copyright law apply?
And why should big grabs of pre-existing data be protected?
Just because it's on a computer is no reason to get stupid about how law applies.
But take a look at copyright. The idea behind copyright is that creative work is good for our culture. Ideally it would be free to anyone, but then there would be no incentive to create. Maybe artists would create anyway but rather than risk a bunch of starving painters and writers perhaps we can find a balance between what is good for society (free unencumbered access of work of cultural importance and the ability to make derivative work) and what is good for the artist. Copyright does this by giving the artist a limited amount of time to control the work. Culture doesn't suffer too much because the term is (or used to be ) limited and the artist can have a stab at making a living. It's a balance.
Now look at this case. The availability of data--court records for instance--is of fundamental importance to a free society. Striking a balance between the public and the collators of this information will be much trickier. It is much more critical than a novel or play and it diminishes in value to the public over time. While a Melville novel still holds cultural value, court records from Melville's time won't help us police our judicial system. Once someone has control over public information, they can charge what they like for it, withhold it, and prevent others from publishing it. That is a recipe for abuse and for very expensive information.
Also consider where the data comes from. A quote from the Yahoo article:
Backers of the measure say it would allow database providers to protect themselves against those who simply cut and paste their databases and resell them, or make them available for free online.
So they don't want somebody cutting a pasting. Where exactly did the providers get the information in the first place? They cut and paste it from somewhere else. And that is the point...they didn't create the information. It does not belong to them. It is public. And by giving them license to control it and prevent others from using it we lose something very valuable, of critical interest to everyone and give it to a handful so they may profit. It just isn't worth it.
If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
I'm not Seth.
The problem is that most databases are simply lists of facts. Give someone ownership of a database, and you have given them ownership of the facts; it's not at all like traditional copyrights over prose or over music, which are designed to protect expressive, artistic content.
Imagine that you decide to make a database called "Names of Professional Writers of Manhattan and their Phone Numbers". You spend ten years of your life calling for and assembling submissions from writers and you finally make your list available for free on your Web site only to get sued the very next day by the company who makes the phone book... because your data is a subset of their copyrighted database of all Manhattan phone numbers, too large a subset to be covered by fair use.
You have to either pay them to publish the information that you found, or you have to take it offline.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Legal loophole my foot. Copyright law is supposed to apply to creative work, nothing else. And the point of copyright law is to advance society in general, not the people who make creative stuff (the only reason we do anything for them is so that they'll make more creative stuff).
This is laughable. From where did "database providers" get THEIR information? (By cutting and pasting someone else's database of course.)
Collecting publicly available information and presenting it in a useful format does require investment may provide users value - this what search engines like Google do - but it seems to me that it should be HOW this information is collected and presented - rather than the information itself which needs to be protected.
In essence copyright protects format, not content. Google can patent the way they collect information and copyright they way they present information, but they can't claim ownership to the information itself.
If protection is extended to content, it would seem to me to be an entirely new class of intellectual property which, at least in the US, would have no Constitutional basis and which the US Congress should have no authority to create.
This is laughable. From where did "database providers" get THEIR information? (By cutting and pasting someone else's database of course.)
If you extrapolate your assertion to the logical conclusion, then what you are saying is that no-one put the information (represented as data) into the original database. Doesn't whoever put the data there in the first place deserve the rights over that information, assuming that it was not in the public domain, and that they wish to excercise said rights ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
This has nothing to do with the NY Times. All of the Times' articles in their database are copyrighted; you can't reproduce them without consent.
This bill is intended to protect compilations of non-copyrightable material such as, oh say, court opinions and statutes, like Westlaw and LexisNexis.
Interestingly enough, Thompson-West--though they can't copyright the opinions themselves--claims copyright on the page numbers of their bound volumes of the Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and other series of publications which all contain court opinions from various jurisdictions (they're typically the only place in which hard copies of opinions are actually published), thus stopping competitors from digitizing these books (with internal, citable page numbers in them) and creating their own databases. See Who owns the Law?
As a farmer, I know how appaling theft of intellectual property can be. I selectively breed plants, spend much time and effort to produce healthy and unique plants, and then people can come along and take them, use them for their own purposes, profit from them and all without rewarding my efforts and ingenuity.
Society needs to realise that everything should be owned. Look at all those programs that use your presence in a crowd, say at a local sporting event, to profit. What do you see for your contribution? Nothing. And that needs to change.
Sniff my fart? I spent money on expensive and rich foodstuffs, and yet you inhale my methane for free. Where's the justice?
[serious stuff]
Extensions of the scope of copyright monopoly, are logical to the concept of intellectual property, and in being extended they reveal the underlying absurdity of the concept.
The concept is itself a hack, a convenience invented for a greater good, a "necessary evil" but it is only a good in it's restrained form. Extended to information and facts, it reveals it's malignant core: ownership of eveything that is naturally free and available to all, now only at a price.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Oh for ... all right, fine. If they have the same rights as everyone else, let them enforce those rights under the same laws! I am so God damned sick and tired of every pissant little group or corporation whining about how it, and only it, needs special legal protection from the Internet because {insert stupid fradulent claim here}. That's pure baloney, my friend. People and/or corporations do not need protection from the Internet. The Internet needs protection from them. And as we allow these selfish little bloodsucking bottomfeeders to impair the utility of the Internet, we all suffer. Other major inventions such as the wheel, the printing press, spacecraft, the computer, the laser, or even air conditioning have not had such a profound, positive effect upon every culture on the planet virtually overnight. The Internet should be protected as the important global resource that it is, and if that means that private concerns can't "protect" their public domain databases as much as they would like, so be it.
The irony here is that it isn't difficult to control access to a database. Sure, if you are foolish enough to leave your entire database on an open FTP server, you should expect someone to grab it in its entirety. But if you provide access via a Web server or other programmatic front end, it's virtually impossible for someone to acquire your entire dataset. You, as the database "owner", have control of how and when your information is accessed. Consequently, I don't really understand the need for additional laws on the subject.
On the other hand, if you publish a database of readily-available public-domain records, you should have no recourse when someone uses that data, unless you have a contract with that party spelling out usage constraints. None of this requires any modification to law, merely awareness and enforcement of existing ones.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I work for, and own stock in, a database publishing company. After reading the /. story, I thought I should start making plans for my retirement as Congress was about to shoveling cash into my grubby hands. But after reading the Yahoo article, I don't really see it happening. *sigh*
For those who are having trouble parsing the proposed legislation, consider the following scenario: You get the bright idea to publish a directory of computer consultancies in the Pacific North West, knowing that time-pressed IT geeks would love a fast way to find specialists with a particular skill. So you start a company, spend a year finding and calling individuals & other companies, asking how big they are, what services they offer, what types of projects they tackle, what certifications their staff has, etc.
Finally the big day arrives and you print your directory and mail it to 10000 Seattle-area IT workers. Two weeks later, you're web surfing and find nwcomputerservices.com. And it's got all your data! Same companies, same info, even some of the same mistakes! You're pissed - they've ripped you off. But when you talk to your lawyer, she tells you there's little you can do. It's not illegal for them to copy your data, as long as they didn't duplicate your published (and copyrighted) printed directory.
In practice, US directory publishers work around this situation via license agreements, existing law, etc. So while this law would probably be a good thing (similar laws exist in the EU and probably elsewhere), it's hard to see that it's going to massively transfer cash to directory owners, or make us all slaves to the big corporations, or whatever else michael was worrying about when he posted the article.
So just STFU and consume. That's the message corporate America and it's subsidiary, Congress, are sending you. Increased IP protection is one way to keep low-stakes players out of the game. Increasing the legal risk of publishing counteracts that the Internet has reduced the actual cost of publishing to practically zero. Patenting algorithms counteracts that small software houses can compete with big ones.
The idea is to keep a wall between the peasants and the nobles. If the peasants build ladders, make the wall higher. If they start digging tunnels, put in a moat. If trees overhang the wall, cut them down. And if the peasants ever figure out how to turn straw into gold and mint their own coins, you burn all their straw and cut off their hands.