Slashdot Mirror
Who Owns The Facts?
windowpain writes "With all of the furor over the Patriot Act a truly scary bill that expands the rights of corporations at the expense of individuals was quietly introduced into congress in October. In Feist v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. the Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted. But H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act neatly sidesteps the copyright question and allows treble damages to be levied against anyone who uses information that's in a database that a corporation asserts it owns. This is an issue that crosses the political spectrum. Left-leaning organizations like the American Library Association oppose the bill and so do arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who wrote an impassioned column exposing the bill for what it is the week after it was introduced."
[T]he Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted.
Would the Linux people, then, be able to assert that their C code is merely programmable facts which generates certain (MD5|MD4|SHA1|etc) hashes? Chew on that one, SCO.
Trolling is a art,
Don't corporations own enough without owning random bits on some LaCie hard drive somewhere? Information is universal and it should be free. End of story.
...that most of the people who post to slashdot don't need to worry about being in violation if this bill passes. Facts have never stopped anyone here yet!
"arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly"
Sound's like MC Frontalot's little brother.
Then nobody can copy the yellow/white pages either.
Quick question: does it have to be a corporation owning the database, or can it be a private individual?
Man...go AC or something before you go and make yourself look like an ass like that. Tha's not coo', j0.
You can say goodbye to the GPL being enforceable.
If it goes one way, it can go the other in this situation.
insert into facts (object,property) values ('sky','blue')
There we go.
# Erik
From the text:
(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--
(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;
(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and
(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.
(b) INJURY- For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue.
(c) TIME SENSITIVE- In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved.
I have been pwned because my
are starting to make me seriosly consider living inside a cardboard box... unless ofcouse it would be a copywire violation to use the word cardboard or box, maybe a coragated cube... then again apple could sue me for using the word cube...
Too bad guys (greedy corps and stupid politians) they beat you too it!
Slashbots.
"Using facts" seems a little vague to me... but what about bibliographies? "These data were obtained from....." This is already how we do it when getting facts from books; isn't that good enough?
Esoteric reference.
...in times of "communism", there was far more freedom than it gets to be in the US. It's sad that a country that boasts to be the most 'free' in the world, slowly becomes another empire of evil, democracy no longer fulfilling its purpose, law in hands of corporations, money being the highest value, crime and violence becoming leading powers driving the economy.
It's just sad.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
What, so now I can't talk about something that a company thinks it owns? The question of whether or not people can own ideas or material has been pervasive for a long time (i.e., RIAA lawsuits with intellectual music property, DMCA restrictions on undermining copy protection), and I have to wonder where it's taking us. With the computer, we've seen a mass 'liberation' of thought and media, and a while ago it was considered a good thing that people could have access to culture so easily. But there have been major arguements as to what should count as a marketable product. Companies are insisting that they should be paid for their wares, and I guess from that viewpoint I agree. They should be paid for what they do. However, if what they do is think of an idea, and then if they tell everybody about that idea, I expect them to not charge me for thinking about it. I think our culture will go down the drain if it doesn't accept that some things are not private property.
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
Wrong. It limits the rights of everyone, period. Why do people so consistently miss the fact that less government involvement neatly solves problems like these?
Someone should make a fuckedrepublic website so that we can predict when our rights are revoked and for which reasons.
Illegal search and seizure, May 8, 2005: Homeland Defense.
Right to Private Property, September 19, 2006: Corporate Bottom Lines.
Freedom of Speech, December 2, 2003: This post.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
What if the database contains genomic data, physic constants, scientific observations, historical facts, etc?
RTFB.
Then you don't have to ask such silly questions.
"I'd like to cooperate, Detective. But... you see... there's the issue of copyright..."
= 9J =
PHP db hook and you're home free
Innovation and invention rely on the exchange of ideas in order to happen. The more freely ideas are echanged, the greater the pace of innovation and invention. There used to be a wonderful show on TLC that illustrated this idea called "Connections", back in the day when TLC still carried original and interesting programming... It would seem to me that political interests -being wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate interests- are trying to legislate innovation and invention out of existance. Furthermore, this isn't a partisan problem: Dems and Repubs alike are more interested in serving the corporate dollars that have elected them than they are interested in serving their constituents. While we all yell about Bush, Haliburton and Diebold we are ingnoring the real problem of election reform, and if and when the Dems ever regain the high office, the problem will be as negleted as it is under the current administration. If we are to restore the free exchange of ideas to stimulate invention and innovation, we need to sperate the politicians from the corporate dollar.
99% of bills introduced into Congress are quiet ( unless you watch C-SPAN. No where in the Constitution does it say that a loud proclamation of all bills must be made.
A few quick notes:
I won't annoy all of you by requote the whole text of the bill (which I highly recommend you read before flaming). However, from my reading of it, all it seems to prohibit is for someone to make available significant amounts of a commercial database for their own profit. Basically, you can't spider Lexis-Nexis or the like and sell the info, but you CAN independently collect that data from direct sources and compete with them.
If I'm missing something here, PLEASE tell me. Again, read the bill first though, before you spew fire.
From the bill: (b) TERMINATION- Subsection (a) shall cease to be effective at the end of the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act. Subsection (a) give the Supreme Court the right to declare the law unconstitutional, so in other words, the Supreme Court has 10 years to rule the law unconstititional. Otherwise, it sets aside the First Amendment and then can't be reviewed.
You just know it'll pass.
From the Bill:
SEC. 5. EXCLUSIONS.
(stuff deleted)
(b) COMPUTER PROGRAMS-
(1) PROTECTION NOT EXTENDED- Subject to paragraph (2), protection under section 3 shall not extend to computer programs, including any computer program used in the manufacture, production, operation, or maintenance of a database, or to any element of a computer program necessary to its operation.
(c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of hyperlinking of one online location to another or the providing of a reference or pointer (including such reference or pointer in a directory or index) to a database.
So presenting the data via a reference to the original data is still allowed.
I have been pwned because my
It seems that the more people argue over intellectual property and now simple collections of facts, the more I find myself questioning property in a more general sense. What exactly is property? All these litigations are attempting to define it's edges, but to their own ends. There needs to be a distinction between what a person owns (house, car, dental floss, etc) and what a person has creditied to him/her (a book, music, anything reproducable really). From there, perhaps it will be easier to decide how the ownerships and credits of such things are to be handled... but not before.
Esoteric reference.
Kinda anyway.
I wanted to copyright my demographic information then charge company's to use it to send me junkmail. Now someone else is goign to own my info. I wonder if they would sell me, or license me, the right to use my info.
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
One reason Marxism came to be popular in the 19th century was that, particularly in Europe, most individuals were stripped of the means to own things. Marx point was this rapidly reduced society into two classes, one that was actually lower than the serf or slave, and a much smaller one that was wealthier than even the old aristocracy ever had been. While I dont nessisarly agree with his proposed solutions, I see similar parellels between the power of corporations today to own and use and the ability to restrict ever more individuals from the ability or means of ownership or use, whether it is ideas or physical things (yes, eula-like licenses are being used by some on commercial sale of physical goods already).
Yea! Thank God they thought of the poor telemarketers!
Information wants to be free, but there's still big bucks to be made from plundering the commons and attempting to enforce more artificial scarcity.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Crazy idea - /. incorporates, with all current users listed as directors, and all our personal info goes in a giant DB. Now, when any other corp. uses our name/address/telephone no./email/DOB/hair color/eye color/etc, we can just sue the living daylights out of them! Or maybe incorporate with your family, or your roommates, or whatever...the sky's the limit! Screw the DNC list, you can get TRIPLE damages for those annoying telemarketing calls...and just IMAGINE what we can do to spammers!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
And that's not the only place in the text that precludes any liability on the part of Government.
Seems that this is being "snaked" through with clauses of immunity for the "skull and bones" people...Disgusting...
db
Cig:
ôô
A previous article about how maptech obtains their map data prompted a reader to propose an opensource type map data clearing house with the data being submitted by volunteers. I am working on trying to create just such a thing and I am looking for some kind of protection for the data to keep what happened to CDDB by Gracenote from happening to it.
Now it sounds like if something is a fact, such as the location of something by lat/long, the titles of tracks on an album by some artist, or the square root of 144, it is in the public domain by default, assuming this bill doesn't go through. Am I interpretting this correctly?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Those kind of damages could hurt your ears! Most laws are limited to triple damages. (In Timothy's defense, Slashdot topic misspellings are at an all time low.)
As an experiment in thought or action....
So your name, address and telephone number are facts that cannot be copyrighted? No one can copyright the telephone book?
Truth is relative. We all know this. In this specific legal context, facts are the things defined outside of self, by an established authority, usually government or corporate. The name of a street is a fact, because it is named by government zoning committees. A phone number is a fact because Bell says so.
What we need is ART and imagination to illustrate how what we believe to be facts are not facts. How facts are internal imaginative motions crystallized into The Other.
A call to ART that mixes and redefines telephone numbers, streets, names, numbers, vital statistics. Replace one fact with another to show its arbitrariness--perhaps define your web domain name as your personal ultimate fact. Or network with others to create a new authority which renames all street names by some agreed upon code... and then send mail to that code and not the law's (even rejection will be interesting as it swells in numbers)
Creative juices are flowing. And so on. Show these fascists that life isn't so binary.
The Custom Mary
You need to read the case about the building codes. I suggest you go to the guy's site where he tried to publish the building codes, and the case went all the way to SCOTUS.
Last time I checked (few months ago) the codes still weren't published even though he won.
I've tried getting the codes myself, for my state. They're over $70. Think about it for a minute. These aren't just a collection of facts. These codes are the LAW. So I have to pay a private company to find out what the law is.
What did the guy do? After searching through various retail locations and coming up empty, he decided to publish THE LAW of building codes for the particular town he was interested in, and he was taken to court by a private company.
I thought I could search my state/city's web site to find out what the codes were, but thanks to the private company, virtually all states/cities/towns in the US "adopt by reference", and don't publish what the actual codes are, therefore you are forced to pay if you want to know what the law is.
To make it simple, codes are necessarily published in a certain order, in a certain format. Changing the format wouldn't work. So if the private company publishes a book of codes (they do), you can't copy the book and put it on a web site, according to the proposed law. If the company also publishes the codes online, you can't do the same. So you'll go to their site you say? They don't publish all the codes. And the ones they do publish, you have to go through multiple directory trees, or they make it exceedingly and annoyingly difficult to get more than one or two sub sections at a time. If you are familiar with building codes, this is a non-starter.
The other option is 1. going to the library (it's a reference book, you can't take it out. or 2. going to the county clerk (a major pita in most cities, and it's a reference, you can't take it home).
Can you see it now?
Biologists can already copyright dna and protien sequences w/o knowing what they are thats basically just a fact. IP thought truly requires complete destruction/reconstruction to focus things properly before we decide to throw out the bill of rights.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Its is important to note that this statement is basically greedy on the part of the public. The reason for USPTO is to benefit those of us without patents by making the technology curve keep going up. If the tech curve goes up with a one year monopoly, mission accomplished. What is not here even by implication is that the creator of an idea has any right to the profit from it. Those techies who disagree are free to send every scrap of everything you will ever have to the estates of either Turing or Plank depending on your hard/software affilliation. Anyway if corporations want real security they should use peer reviewed crypto like everyone else has to rather than try to outlaw knowledge.
Okay here's the RIAA/MPAA Spin on it. Take i360, have them harvest p2p users and IP addresses and viola - something that's Excluded!-
(B) EXCLUSIONS- The term database does not include any of the following:
(i) A work of authorship, other than a compilation or a collective work.
(ii) A collection of information that principally performs the function of addressing, routing, forwarding, transmitting, or storing digital online communications or receiving access to connections for digital communications, except that the fact that a collection of information includes or consists of online location designations shall not by itself be the basis for applying this clause.
Hmmm.. what kind of subscriber lists are excluded?
Damn this pisses me off.. time to read up...
INSERT INTOL ECT
DontLetCongressSee
(object,
property)
SE
object,
property
FROM
facts;
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
While I am still concerned to some extent about this bill, as I read it the situation is not nearly as dire as the posting suggests. To begin with, the claim that the bill
is untrue. It imposes no liability on users of a database. It deals only with people who
Unless I have missed something, you can make use of any data you can get your hands on. What you can't do is distribute to others the whole database or substantial chunks of it. Furthermore, the owner of the database can't just claim to own it; it has the burden of showing that it generated the database through a substantial investment of money or time.
The bill is fairly restrictive. It exempts government databases, explicitly permits hyperlinking, and contains exceptions for news reporting and educational and research uses. Furthermore, the restriction only applies if the unauthorized redistribution "inflicts an injury", where this is defined as follows:
I'm not sure how this is to be interpreted, but it seems to me that it may permit derivative works insofar as they are not functionally equivalent to the original. In sum, I'm nervous about restrictions on databases too, but this bill seems to be pretty narrow. Its possible it prohibits things I wouldn't want to see prohibited, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as awful as suggested. I'd like to see a proper analysis of the intent and legal interpretation of this bill.
Here's an idea - why not incorporate yourself? Filing fees aren't that terrible - at least not if you file in the state of Delaware - and then you can enjoy all the rights and privileges of fellow corporations like Enron, Worldcom, and SCO! File abhorrently incorrect taxes! "Restate" your earnings to the IRS!
In all seriousness... if you're not a corporation or affiliated with one, you might be in a bit of trouble as the current pro-business administration continues its legislative agendae.
Chris Inc.
Subscribe for free to my show!
The Discovery Science Channel (170 on iO digital, Cablevision) still plays Connections rather a lot, sometimes for marathons. It's a great way to spend a late night on the couch with whatever supplies you see fit ;D
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Bills get introduced all the time to do all kinds of shit. Every session of Congress, for example, some idiot introduces a bill to repeal the Second Amendment. Some other schmuck introduces one to repeal the 22nd Amendment. Neither of then go anywhere, neither will this one.
Of course, we'll see 3-4 dupes of this on /. before it's all over . . .
I'm afraid it's your limited vocabulary when combined with your bad attitude.
Sorry, end rant.
C|N>K
...probably, that some people think less government solves all problems "like these" neatly, as if idealogical consistency were more important than evaluation, analysis, and good judgement.
Also, and I realize I'm just guessing wildly here, it could be that the stated "fact" is often disguised as an opinion, as in the parent post, thus making it easily missed.
sooooooooooo... If the only way to protect your info is to incorporate and compile it with significant money/time investment, then perhaps the result of this law would be a "rush to compile" as many DBs as possible. Now, who would have to gain from having more and more DBs?
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Just think, some corporation could copyright the steps to yoda doll insertion! Oh noes!
This post is on topic damnit
> ...against anyone who uses information that's in
> a database that a corporation asserts it owns.
This legislation is certainly objectionable, but nothing in it singles out corporations.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I jumped right at it, but somebody had beaten me to the task already. Looking forward to the results...
I wonder if they would sell me, or license me, the right to use my info.
Probably not. I'm sure they'll happily license the right to use your info to a marketing company though.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
treble - adj.
1. Triple: "treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day" (George Eliot).
2. Music. Relating to or having the highest part, voice, or range.
3. High-pitched; shrill.
Good god boy, one would almost think you ain't never been fishing! (If you actually haven't...well, I truly pity you. But anyway, a triple-hooked fishook is called a "treble hook".)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
" This is an issue that crosses the political spectrum. Left-leaning organizations like the American Library Association oppose the bill and so do arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who wrote an impassioned column exposing the bill for what it is the week after it was introduced.""
then it will die...however, the authors had to know this,, so what they really want will be in a 'rewrite' of the bill.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
have had peoples arms in their cunts
In that case Kathleen Fent is a wild mare.
The way you interpret a proposed law!
Amazing!
You should go clerk for the Supremes!
Your deep linking argument is flawed. Try deep linking to the National Electical Code.
And as for everything else, try strolling down your local Best Buy, then posting their prices on your website. Before you do, go talk to FatWallet about BestBuy. Then go talk to the other corporations that aren't mentioned in this slashdot article, who are also pushing this to prevent price comparisons, something you would know if you were following the issue.
Then go read up on the lexis/nexis issues over this proposed law.
Then go read up on the building codes issues, and public laws issues on this proposed law.
Then maybe you should read the Library Association's position on the law.
Then go take a law 101 class.
Googles database covers nearly everything on the internet. They would instantly own the internet!!
And then let them know that you are going to do everything in your power to see that:
(a) The public knows as much about this as possible and their true intentions behind it;
(b) You are doing everything humanely possible and legal to see that they are never re-elected or hold office again.
Yes. The legislation *seems* mild, but this legislation provides no benefit to the public or general welfare and is an excellent handmaiden to the DMCA. It DOES provide welfare to the very rich/powerful elite - and YOU are not part of that equation.
I think a lot of us who are involved with open source in one form or another are fast concluding that this is no longer about the freedom to choose technology, or an operating system, or even the right to share information among our peers - but about freedom from tyranny.
Did anyone catch the NPR story on Choicepoint today? They're the folks you go to if you want a background check done on somebody. They get some (all?) of their info from publicly accessible government sources, like court records. I don't know how directly relevant it is to this particular discussion, but I hadn't heard of these folks before, thought they were worth mentioning.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
Definitions:
ME -- The collection of the person who I am, my physical, psychological, empotional, and spiritual being as relates to any physical, fantasy, on-line, or spiritual realm, any characteristic of who I am, any description of who I am or of any characteristic of who I am,
DATA -- Any piece of factual information
BELONGS TO -- Any data that describes ME or any of the individual characteristics of ME
This set of data consitutes a database. As such any unauthorized commercial appropriation, use, or distribution of these data are subject to sever legal penalties.
All you us is belong to us now.....
they can do whatever they want. it's your haradware, but not your OS. and it's also not your word processor (MS Word). so in reality it's not your data. thus, and the word processor does, and the OS does, it doesn't really belong to you. the last XP service pack said that microsoft can pretty much do as they please with your computer. WMP keeps a database of every media you listen/watch. and with the new DRM, they are limiting what you can with your comptuer even further. so since it's their database, then it's their data. sorry to rain on anyone's parade...
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This is where I wonder what could be covered by this act. Maybe if it were only concerned with databases containing, say, financial or such information it wouldn't be so bad, but how about if a company is archiving most or even all of its internal communication?
Sounds to me like the leaked diebold memos would have been a great chance for a smackdown lawsuit in this case...
Even better, how about if you are emailing something to yourself at home, maybe on a break. Even if your company didn't contractually claim exclusive rights to anything coming out of your head, if it was archived from corporate email then wouldn't this give them rights to it?
Just throwing around some basic doom+gloom, I'm sure the professionals (corporations) would be able to come around with some more advanced methods of screwing us over...
I read most of the bill and Phyllis Schlafly's article. I'm scared by her example of Veeck vs SBCCI, but then again I was heartened to read this passage from the bill.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce.
By way of example suppose...
CASE 1
The phone company in my town prints its DB of customers and phone numbers and sells that book. I buy a copy of that book and take it to kinkos and give it away for free. Should I be punished?
CASE 2
Same town and phone company, but this time I go to every person in my small town and ask what their phone number is, collect that info into my own book and give that book away... "INDEPENDENTLY GATHERED INFORMATION" Seems like I'm in the clear.
On the surface I'm OK with this, but at least one problem is that the book from case 1 may be indistinguishable from the book in case 2. Will burden of proof lie with me or them?
In other words, who owns "*BSD is dying!"?
Perhaps the solution to this is to use the proposed law to make what you want to do possible.
What we need is some sort of an "Organization that is run By the People For the People" (OBPFP) which collects their personal info for placement into a DB.
Since this org would be working for the people most persons would want to join. See $$$ making opportunity below.
Then when Joe Marketer uses this info in a manner that you don't like you have the OBPFP sue the crap out of them.
Any funds retrieved would be divided up to pay the necessary lawyers (of course a majority of the funds, unfortunately), then a bit for jumpstarting the next average joe's lawsuit, and then a bit to compensate you.
Caution: Contents under pressure
If it were against the law to re-publish (which implies a publication in the first place) then the company publishing the laws would also have to stop publishing...
I'm more in agreement that this is a case where someone is taking data compiled by someone else and publishing that, which should be against the law. If you can point to the section that says that no-one has the right to look up the text of the law and re-publish that... but to me it seemed the law was only about re-publishing someone elses database (like via a database scraper). I'm not sure what that would do to price-watching sites though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A Rublician and a Democrat in agreement, when did that happen?
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
IANAL, but this law looks OK.
It looks, on its face, to be carefully crafted to keep people from taking large chunks of other people's databases and selling them as their own.
In effect, it gives copyright-like protection to formatting information into a database. It's the format, and the particular collection of the data that is owned, not the information itself.
You must to yield now. We have own all your databases.
sigs, as if you care.
"With all of the furor over the Patriot Act a truly scary bill that expands the rights of corporations at the expense of individuals was quietly introduced into congress in October."
Quick, someone find us a Grammar Nazi!
A few years ago I did alot of research about countries all over the world - and came to the conclusion that the US is still the best when it comes to freedoms other than maybe Switzerland and Finland. As much as I hate the taxes, regulations, war of privacy^H^H^H^H^H^H oops I mean terror and other restrictions here ... believe it or not in most other places it is actually worse.
While many countries have strengths in a few areas, overall the US is still the strongest. For example, Hong Kong has some of the best free markets anywhere, but being part of China it is not a good option. Other countries have great tax opportunities, like Belize, but the US came down hard on them with it's mighty economic and political strength - and that was that. Believe it or not, if you're NOT a US citizen, the USA can even be a massive tax haven.
Anyhow, after lots of study I came to some conclusions. All the great frontieers, xcept for perhaps the ocean and antartica, (space... other planets...) are taken. The US is really the last frontier of freedom, and the next frontieer is most likely not to be a political landscape, but rather a technological one. For example, use encryption, freenet, and p2p technologies on the internet to secure your right to copy until the enemies pitter out. (which they will, because things that thrive by taking away freedom are never long term tenable)
By doing it this way, especially in the US, you can take advantage of the fact that political/economic forces already in place will make it impossible for them to shut down the internet, but will also make it just as impossible to enforce copying restrictions. Some countries like China might go so desperate as to pop a bullet in the head of anybody who views unauthorized data without trial, but once again political realities in the US more or less make that impossible. In a way, we have the government check-mated.
(c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of hyperlinking of one online location to another.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Does this mean that Google now owns the world?
it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor
...would create a new federal property right in online and offline databases (collections of information), and give the federal courts power to police the use of information in databases.
It's much more than that. Often, "big corporations" aren't the licensees of the data; smaller entities are (such as is the case in many state data distribution contracts, e.g. DMV databases which are auctioned off like radio spectrum in an irresponsible manner). Subsequently, the "evil big corporation" matter is a red herring. We need to keep the eye on the fundamental - the government's aspiration to implement a Stationer's register system that requires the authority of the crown in order to access public information. Imagine the absolute power politicians will have in defining who can and cannot see public records.
Per the original post's critique link:
H.R. 3261
This is much more than a theft of public information (again, mirroring the FCC's approach to spectrum auctions). Much of this government information is necessary for ensuring compliance. Imagine, for instance, if driving laws were maintained in a Federal database, but access to that database required a $25,000 annual fee.
Failure to have access to this database would result in recurring noncompliance; e.g. making normal citizens recurring lawbreakers.
Certainly many politicians aspire to extend a political system that ensures all citizens are lawbreakers and subsequently dependents upon the system. Concealing public information which is necessary for legal compliance is a terrible move towards tyranny.
H.R. 3261 would allow federal courts to impose stiff penalties if someone uses information from a database that a corporation claims to own.
Almost sounds like it was written by Kafka:
"I'm sorry sir, but to divulge what crime you have been charged with, absent proper licensing and permitting of your access to the Federal crimes database, would be a crime of itself. Certainly you wouldn't wish to compound matters, would you?"
Incidentally, I see that Rep. Billy Tauzin, known as the loyal Representative from BellSouth, is a cosponsor of this bill. Good rule of thumb: if Billy's involved, it's probably not on the level.
*scoove*
It's amazing, stupidity is reaching epidemic proportions.
And as the ancient saying (in various different languages) goes, only death cures stupidity, and these politicians prove that it's incurable.
There are major differences here, as 'Intellectual Property' can be used by an unlimited number of people, while OTOH for example a million people sharing a single car would cause problems. Physical property can not be shared in such a way that everyone is rich, and this, along with a centralization of power, are the reasons communism fails. Removing IP would not cause massive poverty, because we could all share effectively, and a million people can use an idea at the same time. It would not cause the corruption communism has either, as there need not be a centralized distributer, a P2P model would work here(once again due to the fact it can indefinately be replicated).
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
The free-market system depends on scarcity of information.
Excuse me? A free market can't exist without open sharing of information. When information is hidden, people engage in transactions they wouldn't touch if they knew all the facts. E.g., lemon cars that break down a week after you buy them, or buying a computer for $1000 when you could have gotten the same thing for $300 at the shop down the street. Market forces can only operate when participants knows exactly what they're getting, and what their other options are.
To be fair, you're talking about information as a commodity itself--trade secrets and the like, I imagine--as opposed to information about commodities. However, this law doesn't seem to have any way of distinguishing between the two. If a corporation says the info belongs to them, it's locked up. There's plenty of room for abuse here.
""To this day, all countries utilizing airborne vehicles flying in excess of 20,000 feet must pay royalties to Norway for the commercial use of their property.""
that one is going in my quote file. heheh.
> Its is important to note that this statement is basically greedy on the part of the public. The reason for USPTO is to benefit those of us without patents by making the technology curve keep going up.
Not just greed by those "without patents". Everyone benefits from a world of controlled change. For people to build on the old, it must become old. The same argument FOR "IP" is the argument that is expire in a timely manner. Namely, nobody will invest if they cannot reclaim that investment.
Why would anyone improve on a patent they have no control over? They won't because they can't assume to reclaim the investment. Just as a base patent wouldn't exist if the creator couldn't expect compensation.
Progress is slowed when the time limits are too short AND when they are too long.
Randomness is not good for anybody.
Case in point. DVD is patented. Would it be better to improve on the DVD standard or invent a completely new one?
Reality: China is inventing a completely new DVD standard. The media market will be bifurcated. Almost nobody wins. Not we "greedy public", not the well healed media companies, not the DVD patent holders, not the Chinese. This is the direct result of a dysfunctional patent system created specifically to suit targeted needs of select corruption over time.
If only Congress had obeyed the Constitution, or the court would have held them accountable to it.
> If the tech curve goes up with a one year monopoly, mission accomplished.
And if Copyright had expired on The Mouse, Disney would have had to come up with something to replace it. Call it progress.
Alas, Disney is now quite secure that they have to produce nothing new or progressive for the next 90 years, or whatever "forever really means limited" actually ends up meaning.
If value and control remain absolute and forever, then there is exactly zero motivation to proceed. Ever wonder why I hated my parents odd form of music, yet 20 years later my generation's music is still "pop".
This is a little like the Football Association in England. I am not sure if it's still the situation, but they wanted to charge licencing fees from anyone who published their fixture lists.
They couldn't copyright facts, but printed it in a certain format, and copyright that, and "force/encourage/whatever" people to use that format and pay the fee, or face legal action.
Media outlets go along with the plan, and everyone else of course backs down in the face of the threat of legal action.
There are quite a lot of online sites that are built by hobbyists who collect some sort of information. For example, there are many sites dedicated to old movies, old recordings, old books of various types, etc. Most of these are collected by the hobbyists via a lot of detective work.
Does this mean that some big corporation can come along and claim that all of such a site's data is in their private corporate database, and is thus in violation? In most cases, the hobbyists will have had no access to the corporate database, and likely won't even know that it exists. But in such cases, the data will almost certainly be very similar, because we're dealing with published historical data.
Note that this is the same sort of problem that SCO is bringing out. They claim that linux contains infringements of their private, secret code. Nobody is allowed access to their code, so it's impossible to avoid sometimes duplicating it. But they are successfully causing others to defend against infringement suits, which will be tremendously expensive (e.g. in lost sales) for the defendants even if they win.
How could I ever defend myself against the charge of infringing the data in a corporate database, when I have no access to it? This sort of suit would probably bankrupt me in one or two months.
Is my only option to never publish anything at all, until the time that I become a billionaire with the funds to defend myself?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This bill is unconstitutional, because it restricts my freedom to say something. This absolute freedom of speach (even if I got it from someone else's database fo facts) is preserved by the 1st Amendment of the US constitution:
Amendment I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Copyrights and patents also violate the first amendment to the constitution. However they are strictly allowed under Article I, Section 8, Line 8:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
This clearly does not include collections of facts, as ruled by the US Supreme Court in Feist v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. From the Supreme Court Ruling:
(a) Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original and, thus, are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works. Pp. 344-351.
a fortune500 can steal your data.. republish it.. then scream it's theirs and you stole it.. and you can get in trouble, and there's no way in hell you're gonna be ale to scream it's them, becuase
a) they have money
b) they have money to get the best lawyers
c) they have money to drag a case on until you're broke.
that's another scary thought.
that and the part about taking horse cock.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR032 61:@@@L&summ2=m&#status
.gov site isn't much as far as telling you what the bill actually does. the second link is better, although biased.
If one is local to you, I urge you to write them and tell them to discourage this bill.
One word in the article that unnerves me is assert. This means that no proof necessary, we say it's ours: IT'S OURS. PERIOD>. Applied to common knowledge, in this case. So what if they've filtered out all of the 35-year-olds who masturbate to pictures of their mothers, that may qualify as common knowledge too.
The link to the
whoa. started out as a karma whoring post, but i may have actually had a point.
final thoughts? The mere concept of this bill is insane, and I'm just plain pissed off about it.
-D
... you don't realize that most bills, when people refer to them as "quietly introduced into congress", usually have the connotation of being instigated against the collective will of those congressmen's constituents and the people that put them in office and rather have been introduced to appease their own bank accounts at the expense of their collective masters, known as the MPAA/RIAA and other major corporations.
An apple is green : is this true?
A computer program is obviously not a fact.
perl -e 'print "Hello\n";' : is this true?
Bills like this have opened my eyes and I have joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help fight against such stupidity. www.eff.org
These congress clowns won't hear a single voice but thousands unified will get their attention.
What about the stipulations on level editors included with many games *cough*Blizzard*cough* that forbids the commercialization of your own original levels?
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I claim ownership of the empty set.
Since it's contained in every database, you are all using it without my permission. Send me your checks.
Seriously, this is scary and dumb. I understand and agree with the intent (hassling assholes) but this is a dumb way to do it.
All this talk about "who owns the facts" just brought to mind a snatch of verse I heard the other day while watching Stop Making Sense...
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
--David Byrne/Talking Heads, "Crosseyed and Painless"
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I've read the bill, and I agree with those that dont see the harm here. It seems to me that what this bill is trying to protect is the investment in the collection, storage and maintenance of data.
The fact that some database contains my home address is not related to the fact that my home address is correct in that database. I guess what I'm saying is that my address never will be a primary key for whatever. It is not an absolute. But it is a fact. The owner of that data does not own that fact, they just own a character string. They cannot claim to own my address. If they do, I can easily move.
The fact is that every Atom has an atomic weight. That is a fact. Do we know those atomic weights with any great precision? No - we can make approximations. But we dont have those facts. So, noone can own them.
The fact is that most people have a home address, but just because I think I know what it is at a given moment does not make it a fact, and publishing that information in a database does not mean that I own it.
I guess I just dont get how this is a question of who owns the facts.
Someday, after the grand unification theory has been discovered, invented, whatever you want to call it - I bet someone will try to publish a database of real, actual facts - immutable properties of the universe. They may try to claim ownership of them. I hope they get the shit knocked out of them when they try.
That does clear it up, though I think there are a number of vectors an angry citizen could use to force the matter and get free versons of the law that they could republish...
Still, very irksome that they would publish laws by reference instead of by value!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unless I'm mistaken, this law would make pricewatch and its ilk illegal.
This is probably some of the motivation behind the bill, in fact. The point is that free information exchange increases competition, competition reduces profits, and profit is the American way. Ergo. free exchange of information (facts) is un-American, and must be stopped. Apparently market economies are no longer in vogue...
wait until 9PM to post this? More people would see it if you posted it tomorrow morning.
Hope your trip went well :-).
A few updates...
While you were gone, the US pretty much renounced their Constitution - in the entirety. Some of it was this air attack on 9/11, the day the Terrorists won a war that hardly even was. History will probably record it as the shortest and cheapest victory in the history of Superpower defeats. Anyway, the mere idea of privacy is actively disparaged now and every means of search, seizure, and detainment is pretty much legal, without a great deal of judicial oversight.
Then Disney was about to lose rights to The Mouse and some 15 year old so happened to "steal" a song electronically, and they used that to kill off another big chunk. That wasn't enough, tho, so the Corporations are bringing out full-on "DRM" so Congress need not further abuse The People by blatently overstepping their authority and ignoring every intent. And we thought Corporations were insensitive.
Anyway, we thought our election rules were still clear enough, but the Supreme Court trompled that to death too. Probably just as a matter of functional completeness. You know judges, they're born closure freaks.
Just thought you should know.
On the religion thing, they've pretty much been denying homosexuals equal protections under the law becuase they're, um, "abominations under God" Last I checked, "God", and his "abominations", would be a religion thing. The 10 Commandments are still banned from public display, but we're thinking it's becuase they don't like the "rules" more than them having much to do with "God".
On the speech thing, money is the new definition of speech. Relatively speaking, 99% of Amerians are now officially mute. Well, not technically, but comparatively speaking, the volume control for most is set a few billion dB to the low side. If you care to vote otherwise, fine, the machines are run by Dibold and, well, subject to, um, "upgrades" in real time.
On the patent and copyright things, the Supreme court says it's up to Congress to define what "limited" means. Oh, and what "promote" means. Yea, and "useful" too. So, pretty much, we figure Congress is free to define all the various words in the Constitution to mean whatever they want them to mean, as needed at the time. Unless, of course, it conflicts with the Court's politics that hour.
if( print "Hello\n" )
{
print "True!\n";
}
else
{
print "False!\n";
}
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
"What's wrong here is that it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor.
Who can afford to litigate against a Fortune 500 company whether his database is or is not misappropriated from theirs?"
What follows is a general rant about "the system":
Don't blame the law (unless you think it's wrong in and of itself, of course).
Don't blame the lawyers, they're just mouthpeices: everyone (even the bad guys) needs a voice in a civil society.
Blame the elected representatives who pass bad legislation which screws up the system.
Blame the elected judges who hear ridiculous cases and who let bad legislation pass which screws up the system.
Blame the citizens making up juries who make some of these stupid court decisions.
See where this is going?
Government (and economics, for that matter) is just a way of controlling power. No matter which party you belong to, it doesn't get any more basic than this.
If you don't play the game, the folks who make the rules (your fellow citizens) will fuck you over. Democracy, capitalism, whatever -- NONE of it works if the people sit around and let a minority run the show.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that less government is a good thing: I feel that sane courts and capitalism are more effective than legislature (I trust my vote more among 200,000 corporations than than I do 2,000 politicians). I think less government could solve problems like this, but it will never happen unless lots of folks like me vote.
The same goes for you and what you believe. Welcome to the rest of your life. Put your hands on the wheel.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
How would this not apply to google? They are for profit. Many of the forums and other stuff they cache and catalog seem to be stuff that could be included in this.
The poster's invocation of Feist w/o reference to INS v. AP, or NBA v. Motorola, is very misleading. The limitations below make the legislation constitutionally valid. Policy-wise, that's a different question (indeed, whose interests are we trying to protect?). Also, this legislation is probably unnecessary, given the state law misappropriation causes of action out there. But the framing of story as a constitutional abomination is simply meant to rile the crowd. Have a nice day!
----
FROM THOMAS:
SEC. 3. PROHIBITION AGAINST MISAPPROPRIATION OF DATABASES.
(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--
(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;
(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and
(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.
I like boys too.
-Michael Jackson
When I, a "socialist" "liberal" "secular humanist" am in agreement with Phyllis Schlafly, or even Pat Robertson for that matter (who was spot-on when he said that there's very little difference between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton), something has come unglued.
What exactly are "conservatives" conserving? It's surely not the budget, the environment, or our soldiers. Why do most "liberal" "intellectuals" I know own guns?
I would carry on, but now it's time to stampede some bitch at wal-mart so I can spent my welfare check on something shiny.
I worked for a web firm that was hit with a threatened lawsuit for "copyright infringement", and did the legal research for my boss that included a guerilla study of the FEIST v RURAL decision about eight years ago...
I don't think many of the comments truly understand just how much information is on a typical web site, both on the page and in the server, that would be subject to a reversal of FEIST.
In our case, to give an idea, we presented a "how to" for homeowners on repairing common appliances and when to call the professionals.
Consider this...there are only so many ways that you can say: "Replace the worn part."
That's what we were threatened over; C&D letters and responses flying around, and out of the midst of this, researching for an attorney on our side, I ran across FEIST and Shepardized it out.
We ran with it, pointing out the case, reinforcing the decision, and having the weight of a unanimous Supreme Court decision behind it.
We won. The other guys backed down. We passed the word to a few other web sites being similarly threatened, and the attornies ran like vampires in sunlight.
But this _simple_ of an example, where a common and expected phrase becomes part of a "database", shows how HR 3261 can be applied to us all if it should pass.
This bill needs to be stopped...not just for the threat to the internet, but to basic research, to common students trying to do term papers, to authors trying to write, to even repeating breaking news from a web site or the TV.
"Eustace? Eustace? Are you there? Are you there?" = John Leeming
factland owns the facts.
I thought I might just inform readers that the Australian position on copyright in a compilation of facts is that it is protectable subject matter as long as effort was expended in its compilation or there is some sense of order in the compilation. I think this is an important point for this discussion because no other Common Law country has a similar position to Australia.
The decision was handed down in the Federal Court decision of Telstra v Desktop Marketing and upheld on appeal in the Full Court of the Federal Court here. It was found in that case that the phone company Telstra had exclusive rights to its compilation of the White Pages residential telephone directories. The US case of Feist was mentioned but not followed and the UK case of Hotten was distinguished.
I personally think that it is, on the one hand, ridiculous that people should get people can get copyright for compiling facts, but on the other hand, sensible considering that copyright protects the expression of the ideas or facts rather than the ideas or facts itself (ie protectable if the way in which the facts are expressed is original).
I'm swedish, and I like living here, but get your facts straight!
Living here is good, that is true, but it is not the utopia you make it out to be.
You are describing Sweden in the 70's, not in the 00's. (Being completely intact after WWII gave us a good head start...)
After a slight crisis in the 90's national debt is up, unemployment is up a bit, and we are over all more on par with other western european countries.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
IIRC all the other channels were just advertisements.
That software *patents* should be abolished, in so far as they only extend ideas from other mediums.
...the guy who figured out the Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices, then made a clone recipe? Is he going to get sued to hell for fried chicken?
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
Every single individual who wants to protect their data must become their own legal corporation, and assign all rights and ownership of all personal details to that corporation.
From that point on, any corporation that wishes to use such details must negotiate a contract with the Person Corp., and fight it out, corporate-style.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was about to lose all faith in the Slashdot massiv when it looked like more people would be posting about the Roman D20 then about this bill. But finally, the good guys game through.
A jorb well done.
Anybody surprised to see Tauzin's name here? Add these to your list of corporate lapdogs.
Sponsor:
Rep Coble, Howard [NC-6]
Co-sponsors:
Rep Delahunt, William D. - 11/20/2003 [MA-10]
Rep Greenwood, James C. - 10/8/2003 [PA-8]
Rep Hobson, David L. - 10/8/2003 [OH-7]
Rep Portman, Rob - 11/20/2003 [OH-2]
Rep Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr. - 10/8/2003 [WI-5]
Rep Smith, Lamar - 10/8/2003 [TX-21]
Rep Tauzin, W. J. (Billy) - 10/8/2003 [LA-3]
Rep Turner, Michael R. - 11/20/2003 [OH-3]
Rep Wexler, Robert - 11/20/2003 [FL-19]
First, this HAS to be a violation of copyright law.
Second, it is against NDA's to hand out Apple Part #'s. As a developer, I pay for the right to get Apple to mail me official documentation (more recently in PDF form on a CD)
eBay doesn't crack down on the sales of these manuals either, but they fall under the "CDR Duplication/copying" clause in the "Auctions That Aren't Allowed Section"
I would find it indefensible for someone to say that they are allowed, without consent, to print an Apple logo or even the Apple name in the Garamond or Lucida Font (and have it be associated with Apple Computer) on anything and sell it for a profit. (Where no licensing fees are given to Apple)
Further, the sale of these manuals promotes fraud. Many people buy these manuals for units that are still under warranty or AppleCare. AN INDIVIDUAL CAN NOT work on his own machine under warranty. (Even if qualified) Apple gives you specific things that you can upgrade or replace in a list called; "User Installable Parts" If a customer works on a unit, they will often not tell the tech they go to get it fixed with, under warranty. It is typically the case, that the "novice with the manuals such as this" has ruined the unit even further, or at the very least, cost more time in repair. Repair costs the service provider often has to eat.
Besides, most manuals are on the web.
http://home.wanadoo.nl/manual.man/manuals.html
I would hope that Apple uses this new law to end manual sales on eBay and Yahoo.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
You have the money/credit issue.
Teehee, sue the credit info companies for taking YOUR data.
Then I guess the company I work for owns the "facts" on the 5,000+ resumes we have in our database?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts
to prove anything that's even remotely true.
You can't handle the truth.
I score a 1 just for replying. That's a fact. If I take the trouble to collect statistics about scores on Slash dot that is copyrightable information. The act of assembling data is a copyrightable act. After all it takes work to assemble facts. So while no one owns the facts someone can indeed own a collection of facts. Score 1 - interesting ... unless someone reads what I just said and comments on it.
I like your comments about how Bush is an honest leader, and cheney's views on civil rights are among the best in the nation. Oh wait, you did not say that, you went after attacking me as a person. But I in fact am not a total left wing. I am just against bush. I agree with most republican stands on economics, many of which are the exact the opposite of what bush is doing right now. As a republican bush should be doing more to seperate the fed gov't from the state gov'ts, but he is doing the opposite. He is passing things like the patriot act which give the federal organizations more power over the people. This is another part where I would like to be republican, because I believe that state gov'ts should be seperate. In addition I am in no way an extreme left wing on abortion. I agree that in the early trimesters abortion is fine. But having the babys head come out and then using a needle to suck out the brain and then delivering the dead baby after 9 month is just horrible. Look it up, you will find that under the current law this is legal, and done all over the nation.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
Isn't Choicepoint the group that bungled background checks on some of the freshly minted Homeland Security people? Some were not completed properly and at least 85 felons were subsequently employed in Airport Security.
....
Are you sure that was a bungle, and not the intent? Maybe those felons have useful security skills
-kgj
-kgj
It's known as the database directive.
Being european doesn't make it good though - it seems as if USA and the EU are competing for the title of "worst knowledge legislation". Any "advantages" one party might have is quickly "harmonized" away.
A well-written introduction to how it came this far is "Information Feudalism" by Drahos and Braithwaite.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
so remember these names:
Rep Coble, Howard [NC-6]
(cosponsors of HR3961)
Rep Delahunt, William D. - 11/20/2003 [MA-10]
Rep Greenwood, James C. - 10/8/2003 [PA-8]
Rep Hobson, David L. - 10/8/2003 [OH-7]
Rep Portman, Rob - 11/20/2003 [OH-2]
Rep Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr. - 10/8/2003 [WI-5]
Rep Smith, Lamar - 10/8/2003 [TX-21]
Rep Tauzin, W. J. (Billy) - 10/8/2003 [LA-3]
Rep Turner, Michael R. - 11/20/2003 [OH-3]
Rep Wexler, Robert - 11/20/2003 [FL-19]
-Styopa
That's just a code word for;
"doesn't make any freaking sense, no matter what twisted ideology you try to slap onto it, except to the congressmen who got money"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If private property rights are abridged, you don't have a free market. If property owners aren't free to do what they want with their goods, you don't have a free market. It doesn't matter how scarce or abundant things are if private property rights are non-existent. It wasn't scarcity or abundance of material that made the Soviet economy so horribly broken; it was state ownership of everything.
In the present context, however, it's plainly silly to pretend that information can be "owned". What happens when two competitors "own" the same fact? Or who owns the "fact" that the sun set at 5:15pm yesterday? This is sheer idiocy.
Arrr!
It's a signature not published scientific paper, accuracy is not important. You are actually about a year and a half short on noticing my signature being miss-speled.
As far as Taco Bell not being in your country, well whoop de do! If you had ever been out of you "narrow little world" then maybe you might have seen one and have gotten the joke.
So please go back under your bridge.
I do agree with you on the moderation, how did it get moderated to Interesting-5?! Stupid or funny but interesting?
This means my company can sue the local telco for using the "Propritary Copywriten information", we are forced to submit to them to have DSL service installed for a customer.
They of course use that info to try and get the customer to use thier ISP service instead of ours.
Heh. no more of that.
I'll give you two examples of comodities that are absolutely free and are not in the least scarce yet large industries have grown up around them. Oxygen and sunlight. The two obvisous uses for them is breathing and not having the planet freeze. If you take it a step further then you get into metal fabrication and medical O2 as well as water heating and solar based electricity.
The true value of a product is not it's raw form, but what it can be made into. Companies would like everyone to believe information should be protected, but in reality what they are really after is the reduction or elimination of competition through the control of the raw materials, ie information. If all companies had to give up all their raw information then they would have to compete on the merit of the products they can produce from the raw material alone rather than their ability to collect and hoard information.
Anyway it may seem like I am saying that all information should be free, though I'm not. A companies ability to gather information is as important as how it uses it. Companies that cannot do this well will be driven out of the market in a free-market system. What I am saying is that something does not need to be scarce to be valuable or usefull, though I would question any entitiy or individual's motives for trying to make commodities more scarce than they really are. All they are trying to do is create a monopoly which they can control.
"Left-leaning organizations"
(Oh they're only left leaning)
and
"arch-conservatives"
(ooh, watch out for the Arch conservative)
Or are you suggesting that everyone get together democratically to create an entirely new entity and somehow prevent it from becoming exactly like the democratically-created entity we already have?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
- (a) GOVERNMENT INFORMATION-
This is even better than copyrights, which the federal government is not allowed to produce, but are allowed to "acquire" and (afaik) there is no restriction on local or state governments creating copyrighted works. This bill actually prohibits any governmental agency from exercising the protection of this bill, even if they only "maintain" (as in those pesky copyrighted buiding codes) them.- (1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (2), protection under this Act shall not extend to--
(A) a database generated, gathered, organized, or maintained by a Federal, State, or local governmental entity, or by an employee or agent of such an entity, acting within the scope of such employment or agency; or
(2) EXCEPTION- Nothing in this section shall preclude protection under this Act for a database gathered, organized, or maintained by an employee or agent of an entity described in paragraph (1) that is acting outside the scope of such employment or agency, or by a Federal, State, or local educational institution, or its employees or agents, in the course of engaging in education, research, or scholarship.(B) a database generated, gathered, or maintained by an entity pursuant to and to the extent required by a Federal statute or regulation requiring such a database.
I'd like to see the exclusion to the excemption (only in legalese can such double-talk make sense) for educational institutions removed though. We're paying for their research too.
The other exclusion, that of allowing "off-duty" government employees to own what they do "outside the scope of" their employment to maintain owership of their work would also be nice if it were added to copyright law. As it is now, the application of the "work for hire" doctrine pretty much means your employer owns the brilliant idea you come up with while sitting at home taking your morning dump.
As it stands, this bill is not the threat to public information you make it out to be. Whether or not it's actually good, I'm not so sure.
Can you explain what the joke actually is? I don't remember seeing many Taco Bells when I was in the US (I assume that's what you are talking about).
In the town I grew up in there were two McDonalds within about 10 minutes drive. Now there are close to 15 with several being accross the street from one another.
Taco Bells are like that too. Seems like about every 4-5th cross street you'll find one.
While I love fast food, personally I see them as a plague on the world. It seems the bigger they get the worse and more generic the food becomes.
Ah, I've seen two versions of Demolition Man, and the first one's stuck with me - Taco Bell was replaced with Pizza Hut throughout for most non-US releases IIRC (I saw a Chinese subtitled one). The UK one still uses Taco Bell, but having first seen it with Pizza Hut, that's what I think of...