Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.