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Congressional Committee Approves Database Bill
thisissilly writes "Ready for another set of restrictions to so-called 'intellectual property'? The House Judiciary committee approved a bill to extend copyright-like protection to databases, despite opposition by AT&T, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google, among others. Currently mere compilations of facts, such as phone books, are not copyrightable. This would change that. Coverage from Cnet, Internetnews. No word on a Senate version. Let's stop this one before it grows."
...ANOTHER sort of "Intellectual(R) Property(TM)". This is getting ridiculous. I'm beginning to wonder if it will ever reach a point where Joe Beer and his wife Martha will wake up, take their head out of their Bibles and their AOL chat rooms, and start to give a damn about any of this corporate power grabbing...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
There's a big difference to politicians between "what it says" and "how we can warp it". Patriot Act, harmless on paper, bad in effect, DMCA same thing
Slashdot sucks
This is the equivilant, IMHO, of passing bills making abortion illegal. Phone books and compilations are not copyrightable, says the Supreme Court. Feist v. Rural Telecom. Congress cannot change this and prescient would take priority here, the law would be immediatly challenged and overturned if it directly contradicts Feist. IANAL, but this is my read on it.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
So do I have to cite my source every time I look up a phone # and write it down?!
Looking at the bill- it seems to me that it protects the actual collection effort not the data itself. If someone else wants to go out and collect the same information they can- they just can't steal your collection. I guess I'm missing why this is so bad.
Because the definition of what a "database" is will be twisted to have new meanings.
I wish ordinary people could understand enough to care about this. I wish we could go to their states and to their districts and tell what is happening and their constituents would see these politicians - all of them - for the sellout rats they are.
Do you know what these expansions in "intellectual property" policy are? They are akin lining the pockets of the wealthy by printing more money just for them. No innovation is happening here. They are simply divining "innovation" and "progress" in the arts and sciences out of nothing by the creation of policy.
I pray it will be soon now that this regime of "intellectual property" will collapse - *poof* - when we the people come into that day when we simply will no longer acknowledge these imaginary chains we have for so long pretended bind us.
Tell them we aren't going to play along anymore.
That's not true. The Supreme Court decision that all this stuff comes from is known as Feist. Feist ruled, basically, that the white pages is not copyrightable because there was absolutely no creativity or originality in listing : last name, first name, address, phone number.
If, however, you took a bunch of mere facts and arranged them in an innovative and creative way you very well might be able to get copyright protection for the compilation. the white pates isn't copytightable, but some other collections of mere facts certainly are. The copyright would cover the compilation, however, and not the facts themselves.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. Once that is granted, all else must follow."
They are trying to take that freedom away by declaring that someone can own the rights to such information.
(Tin foil hats are property of the producers of the movie Signs. You had damn well better register that now, before it's too late.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
to the public in exchange for your copyright monopoly. Copyright is about give and take. We give you a limited monopoly and eventually take your copyrighted (plus have use of it for a reasonable fee in the mean time). A simple compilation of facts, while useful, isn't worthy of this protection.
Also, this could be devastating to researches. Imagine writing a paper and facing a lawsuit over your use of facts. True, the facts aren't copyrighted, but at what point have you crossed the line from using and reporting on facts to compiling them? In any case this gives companies another tool to bludgeon poor people with ala DMCA.
This is an appalling idea that's clearly meant to make a few people richer at the expense of everyone else.
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Everyone knows our society is increasingly information driven and information dependent," bill sponsor Howard Coble (R-NC) said in a statement. "We rely on accurate, timely information to make many of the decisions we must reach in a day, an hour, or a minute, and increasingly, this information comes from electronic databases."
"Without the minimal protection afforded by this legislation, we run the risk that new databases will not be created and made available to the public, thereby depriving the public of one more information source."
Maybe "depriving the public of one more information source" would be a GOOD think...in this day and age info is next to worthless because supply far exceeds demand and the quality of most is utter crap.
I for one, would be HAPPY to be deprived of one more spammer's email database, telemarketer's call list or direct-marketer's snail-mail database...
This bill is so wrong headed...these database operators seem to think they're entitled to owning the info they store in their systems. For the most part IT'S NOT THEIRS TO OWN...you can't own the fact that the clear daytime sky is blue. You can't own my vital statistics, or my street address. You have no right to and you never should because you didn't create those facts and they were never sold to you. All you did is set up a computer to store the facts and programs to sort, retrieve and utilise them. Current law protects that already and you deserve no further protection.
Hmm... I thought a heard large sucking noise. It seems my unalienable rights have just been sucked right out of me. It seems I'd have better civil liberties in Iraq.
If anyone makes fun of your tinfoil hat, they are either afraid or stupid. I'm not sure what it was like for doubters in Germany in the 1930s except it was probably similar to whats happening to them now.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I'll call it: The Lets Give the Entire World to Corporate America Act! Let's face it, the way we're heading, it's only a matter of time.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Two comments:
First, in one sense this happened long ago (and makes this law even more stupid). LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two monster legal database companies, had a big lawsuit when they first started moving online because one (Lexis, I think) was copying the other's printed cases to build their online database. The way it came down, if I remember correctly, is that the material itself (e.g., the court's opinion) cannot be copyrighted, but the way it is presented can (such as the numbering system).
Second, I don't think this will have any effect on public access to law. You may not realize it, but everyone of you almost definitely has access to a public law library -- either at the county courthouse, a local university, whatever (no guarantees as to its quality, but its there if you look). Even more relevant, though, is that most court opinions and state laws are available free online from your state goverment (try your state supreme court and legislature webpages), and the trend has been for more and more of this to be published on the web at the same time LexisNexis and Westlaw have grown. The reasons that people use the pay services are that you can find all of the information in one place, and they have sophisticated search tools to find what you are looking for. Local laws/ordinances are harder to find, but they should be available at that law library I mentioned.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
This copyright stuff is getting out of control.
We need to sever the connection between corporate America and democracy. Campain finance reform has the potential to fix a lot of these problems at the root.
When it comes to copyright we can't fight business, but maybe we can end this legalized bribery and weaken microsoft, walmart, the RIAA and the rest in one fell swoop.
they would have to prove that you did. Just as difficult.
Not if they have a couple orders of magnitude more money to spend on legal representation than you have.
Not only can they take your most private information and sell it to anyone that will pay for it, now they can copyright your data too.
I hereby declare that all my personal information is a "compilation database" about me and is copyright by myself alone; anyone using this information without my express written consent will be labeled as a "thief" stealing my intellectual property and will be sued for copyright infringement.
The world has gone nuts!
On the other hand, here we have a bill that explicitly limits how it can be applied. As long as that clause doesn't get removed in negotiations, it's pretty iron-clad.
Because this violates fundamental assumptions about copyrights! A copyright does not protect "effort" or reward "value". A copyright is designed to encourage you to publish your _expressive_ and _original_ ideas in exchange for protection of that originality and expression. If you get protection in exchange for publishing a bunch of data that is already in existance what is the benefit to the public for you century-long private monopoly?
Or, conversely, all those companies out there that have *your* personal information in *their* database can now claim copyright on information about *you*!
Write to your representative. Chances are they won't be hearing much from anyone on this bill, so just a few letters from constituants may be significantly pursuasive.
.... "abridging the freedom of speech"
... 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;
Here's mine:
Representative Walden,
Please oppose H.R. 3261, the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act". It is an unconstitutional violation of free speech. Passing this bill will only cause unnecessary litigation and expense and, in its disposal, consume the valuable resources of our high courts.
The primary purpose of this bill is laid out in Section 3, point a. It prohibits the "making available in commerce" a "substantial part" of a database made by another person. The offending section is included below for your convenience. This prohibits commercial, or profitable, speech when it contains a large portion of another person's database. This violates the freedom of speech laid out in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law"
It is permissible for congress to pass laws which infringe on freedom of speech only in a few very specific instance, such as against traitorous speech, and the exceptions of Article 1, Section 8, Line 1, which establish the power of congress to implement copyrights and patents.
From Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power
This power is granted to congress to encourage authors and inventors, and by extension musicians, artists, and filmmakers, by granting them exclusive rights to their works for a limited time. This exclusive right to the work violates the freedom of speech of others, but is explicitly allowed to encourage art and technology. By precedent, it has two requirements, originality and creativity; the author must be the origin of the work, and it must require some step of creativity to produce it.
Individual facts, like telephone numbers, sizes of stars, or names for babies, are not original. A database, or collection, of these is original in so far as the author's chose which pieces of information to include. Historically, the US Supreme Court agrees, as shown in the case of FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC., v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO., INC., quoted here from Syllabus, point a:
(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.
Representative Walden, please help keep our already overrun legal system and high courts clear from unnecessary litigation; oppose H.R.3261. Please dispose of this ill-conceived bill now, before our it causes our nation, its corporations, and its individuals great expense of disposing of it later.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration,
Your concerned constituent,
Cedric A. Shock
H.R.3261
Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act
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 t
Sounds like this would make it possible for a retailer to copyright the information contained in weekly flyers and prohibit places like fatwallet.com from listing them.
This could have a possibly monstrous effect on online comparison shopping. Things like www.froogle.com become impossible as retailers begin copyrighting their inventory and price databases.
-dameron
Let's say that I create a database that takes non-trivial effort to create. And let's say that the only sources of data that I use are readily available to others. Now you're telling me that the only protection I've got for that database is trade secret? What if I want to let the public access the database, via the Web or whatever? Oops, there goes the trade secret.
Let me give you a couple examples from history. Roget's Thesaurus was basically the dictionary, re-indexed. Young's Concordance was a list of all words in the King James Bible, stating in which passage each word appeared (giving a few words of context), and what the original Greek or Hebrew word was for the English word. Both Roget and Young spent a significant amount of effort on these (at a rough guess, 10 to 20 years, which makes it pretty close to the life work of each man.) Both were published as books. And, if I understand correctly, both were copyrighted under the then-existent laws. Both these books were essentially "databases on paper".
It seems to me that this bill is just extending the same protection to electronic databases that they would have if the same information was published in a dead-tree version. I don't see what's so horrible about it.
Artistic merit? You're telling me that only works that have artistic merit get copyright protection? How much "artistic merit" does the dictionary have? It's copyrighted. For that matter, how about the POSIX spec? Artistic merit? Don't make me laugh. But it's copyrighted.
Note that the law does not protect the individual bits of data in the database, just a "quantitatively substantial part of the information" and only if...
It seems like one of the possible goals of this legislation, from what you've repeated here, might be another way to prosecute spammers. If they buy a database of email addresses, they no longer have the right to distribute that database.
However, there are a lot of other cases where this could have a seriously chilling effect. For example, there's the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, which is served up on the web by the University of Michigan (though they don't compile the data). The most recent year's data is never available on the web, only prior years... you have to pay about $300 for a CD-ROM to get the last go-round. Still, if that database is copyrighted, and I use it to generate some statistics for something someone doesn't like (such as finding that there's a negative correlation between education and going to church), now there's a mechanism to quash my findings. If the compilation of the data is protected under copyright, then derivative works are also under the purview of the copyright holder, and statistics derived from a compilation of data would probably be derivative works.
This seems like it would be mostly used by companies that sell marketing information, and stuff like GIS data. I guess currently it's perfectly legal for me to buy some data from ESRI and then export it to CSV and send copies to all my friends, but this law would prevent that.
Then the question is, should that be legal? Maybe it shouldn't, but it's hard to see how you could really implement a law to protect it without it being wide open for abuse.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The thing is, "databases" like GrokLaw are the ones that don't need this protection. Why make a public database public if you don't want people to use the data? It makes no sense.
I think you've got the poster completely backwards. It's not the Groklaw would be protected, but that for-profit law indexes would prosecute sites like Groklaw under this law. It doesn't matter if they're infringing or not... the reason facts are not currently subject to copyright is that it's darn hard to tell whether someone copied them or went out and got the info themselves.
Private databases aren't shared, so they don't need it. Public databases *are* shared, so (as far as I can tell) they don't need it, or shouldn't be shared.
What about proprietary, for-sale databases? They are neither private nor public. Instead, they are a saleable item. If I want shapefiles of all US ZIP codes to drop into GIS, chances are I'll have to pay for them. But that's just because I don't know someone who already has the data and can give it to me.
You seem to be stuck on the notion that databases are either used only internally or are completely public and free. Lexis-Nexis would beg to differ.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The definition of database is so vague, it can be almost anything. Did you read the bill?
Donning my tinfoil hat, I had these thoughts:
Here is a simple database, containing information which I have gathered:
1+0=1
1+1=2
1+2=3
1+3=4
(etc.)
I shall print this database in a book, thus garnering copyright. I shall make this database available on a subscription basis only, for one billion dollars per user. NOW try and teach your kids basic arithmetic, BWAHAHAHAHA!!
Extreme example, but goes to support what you're getting at: once distribution (copying) of FACTS can be restricted, the only possible end result is widespread ignorance. And ignorant people are easy to exploit and control.
This is pretty much the technique used by churches during the late middle ages, once the rising middle class started getting "uppity". In some areas it was unlawful for a peasant to learn to read, because such knowledge was restricted to the use of the church.
So what happens when laws restricting copying of compendiums of facts (the content of databases) collides with public education? ISTM persons bent on an agenda could pull facts out of the meme pool by compiling, copyrighting, and restricting their public accessability.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?