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.

Comments

Who thinks they can write this bill?

[Mrs. Grundy]

I don't know about you people, but I have lost all faith in the folks in Washington. They seem to be very good at a lot of things but are not especially good at writing legislation. So what do they do? They ask corporations what they would like and if they would be willing to help draft the language. It's outrageous.

Copyright law is designed to protect CREATIVE work. Data is not creative work and no matter how hard it may be to compile said data, it should not result in you owning the data to the exclusion of everyone else. There is no way anyone in Washington will be able to write this bill in such a way that it doesn't screw everybody except for the lawyers duking out infringement cases based on it.

With the internet data has become so easy to find and compile that just about anyone can do it. A lot of people have figured out that this spells trouble for their business plan that was invented in the fifties and are now trying to make a land grab of sorts to protect their bottom line.

more power for companies less pwr for people

[atarione]

Each time we turn around in the U.S. it appears that the power of coporations has grown..... at the expense of individual rights. Hopefully this will not pass, but it very well might. It is stupid the violations they say they wish to prevent are already covered by existing laws, reguarless of whether a database is involved or not.

btw wtf did happen to FAIR USE??????

feel free to quote me..... IF YOU WANNA BE SUED =)

Re:Current law

[aussersterne]

And why should big grabs of pre-existing data be protected?

I doubt the lobbies in favor of this sort of thing really believe that there is any sort of moral or ethical imperative to "protect" databases.

They're simply lobbying for this type of protection because they already have large databases and they think they might actually get it. If they do, they can pull an instant SCO and double or triple their revenue streams.

It's not about "this will be good for people", it's about "Heh... this is sort of slimy... but if we could pass it, our stock would double, so who cares!"

And for the politicians it's simply a matter of "This will piss off a few informed voters, but if the contributions are large enough, the $$$ will subsidize the buying of new voters to replace them with tons left over!"

In Related news...

[segment]

Funny when I just read the following:

Almost everything is for sale on the Internet -- even the Social Security numbers of top government officials like CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft, consumer advocates warned Wednesday. The California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said for $26 each it was able to purchase the Social Security numbers and home addresses for Tenet, Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser. [ original story]

Can you say propaganda? Asscroft and his cabals are using this instance to promote the USA PATRIOT ACT which is odd considering some of the things he proposes will affect businesses... But wait let's call the kettle black now shall we?

When Border Patrol agents came across the corpses of 14 Mexican immigrants who died trying to cross the searing Arizona desert in 2001, a brand new tool helped U.S. authorities identify the bodies and, eventually, the smugglers who abandoned them.

The tool was a database containing the personal information of 65 million voting-age Mexican citizens. The U.S. government bought access to it for $1 million a year from a giant data vendor called ChoicePoint.

U.S. drug and immigration investigators prized the data, accorting to the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement sources, because it gave them latitude to track suspects inside Mexico without alerting local authorities. original article)

Where's Tyler Durden when we need him most