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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."
From the bill:
(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.
What?
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.
C code is no more a set of facts than poetry is a set of facts. C does more than generate hashes, for one thing (at least the Linux code does more than that, else there'd be a lot of coders who've wasted a lot of time). Code is a set of instructions, which are together part of a process. It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book. A collection of, say, reserved names in Java may be merely a collection of facts; an original creation is not. It's also inventive, in the patentable sense (`look-and-feel' patents, of course, raise some big controversy). But it's not simply a collection of facts.
Check the dictionary sometime, treble is a synonym for triple. Also, look at the law-specific lingo.
Perhaps you would care to actually make your case as to what was wrong in what I said instead of just saying it was BS. I'm always open to learn from my mistakes, but telling someone they are full of shit but not actually saying in what way is about the weakest form of debate you could engage in. Well its not even really debate.
... ... a dangerous and radical threat to civil rights and to the security of all our homes and persons."16 Echoing this sentiment, a law review note published three years later emphasized that sneak and peek search warrants "bestow on law enforcement agents unlimited license to rifle through a person's private residence without the owner's knowledge or consent. There is no check on agents' actions to ensure they comply"17 with protections for individual rights, and "the risk of abuse and the subsequent intrusion into privacy is ... severe."18
The sneak and peak search provision of the Patriot Act is widely regarded as one of its most detestable parts and will be the first thing called in to question if Congress ever gets around to revisiting the Patriot Act, something I doubt they will find the backbone to do anytime soon.
Did you actually read the link in my post to the University of Georgia. I'll quote since you must not have read it before you started ranting:
Section 213 of the USA Patriot Act not only specifically grants the federal judiciary power to issue sneak and peek warrants, but also, by allowing their use for every federal crime and by placing no meaningful limits on their issuance, encourages their issuance. It may be expected that as time passes the use of such warrants will become the rule rather than the exception in federal court, and that when a conventional search warrant is issued it will almost always have been preceded by a sneak and peek warrant.
Nearly two decades ago a prescient federal judge, in a dissenting opinion, warned that sneak and peek search warrants "constitute
@de_machina
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
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."