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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."
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?
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? How can you ever establish that you independently generated your database?
When ownership of fact can be the basis of a civil suit, the individual is shut out. Like software patents, the big corporations will own portfolios of databases that they will cross-license to each other while they collectively collude to keep everyone else out.
When I see that the phone company and building-code associations are going out of business because bad guys have misappropriated their "databases," it may be time for such a law. Until then, what's the rush?
I wish legislators would include at least a token discussion on exactly what the problem for which they're providing a "solution." Whose databases are currently being misappropriated?
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're aggravated because your city/county/state has building codes (and other laws) and they're being a bunch of slack bastards about publishing them in an easily used format. There are dead tree versions and unhelpful govt workers, but these are annoying to deal with.
You are misunderstanding, and that's what's annoying. The government entities, whether they are state, city, or town, are NOT publishing period. They have INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE the codes (laws), and they have purchased for the clerk (because the clerk is in the court) one copy for the clerk's use. Because everything that is in the clerk's office that is a law can be read by the public during certain business hours, the public can access if the clerk is not busy, if it isn't a lunch hour, if you can take time off during a work day...
These are laws. Not a collection of facts like baseball statistics.
Now, some other company was started by someone who also noticed what a pain in the ass it was to deal with these codes and figured people might pay to be able to access them in an easy-to-use format. Problem is that they charge more than you want to pay.
More wrong. One organization put together the code. They make their money by selling the code to the trades that are forced to buy from their monopoly if they want to work. Forced to buy the law. Are you understanding this? Forced to buy the law. Not baseball statistics.
Therefore, unless I'm reading you wrong, you're mad that you can't take their data and republish it. Since that's all that I can see is prohibited; you're still free to hassle that clerk until they cough up the codes and then publish THAT. In fact, the only way you can get in trouble is if you republish a lot of this data and can't prove you got it from anything else except the commercial database.
Even more wrong.
The only place you can get it is from buying their book, from the clerk (you can't take it out, you can't sit there and hand copy, you can't bring your own photocopy machine to the clerk's office) or from the library (sit there and copy, what by hand? Copy machine? Who's, yours? Theirs? How much paper/toner will they allow you? How much time?)
And those are the three places, according to facts as came out in the court cases over the building codes case. Regardless of whether, and as it was listed in the case, you collected the code (LAWS) from buying the book, from the clerk, from the library, YOU STILL CAN'T PUBLISH YOUR OWN BOOK, OR ON THE INTERNET. WHETHER FOR PROFIT, OR NOT. The guy won the case, now the National Electrical organization, and joined by the Building Code organization are pushing this bill to overturn that case.
So, while I can sympathize with your dilemna, you might direct your anger more towards the useless govt workers who aren't publishing the codes in a useful manner than the DB company that spent a lot of time trying to make them more usable (if more costly).
As stated earlier, it isn't a government problem of not publishing codes in a useful manner. And it isn't a database company spending a lot of time trying to make them more usable. It is a private organization that is putting together, and publishing the codes (LAWS) themselves, and restricting anyone else from listing those codes (LAWS), and threatening/taking to court anyone who tries (the National Electrical Code Assocation was the case, the Building Codes association joined, and the National Fire Protection Association has threatened others).
So get your facts straight.