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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
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?!
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
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
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!
Or, conversely, all those companies out there that have *your* personal information in *their* database can now claim copyright on information about *you*!
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
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?