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."

Comments

Um, no.

[c0dedude]

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.

Re:Protects work not data

[Polybius]

So do I have to cite my source every time I look up a phone # and write it down?!

actually, factual compilations are (c)able

[nudicle]

Currently mere compilations of facts, such as phone books, are not copyrightable.

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.

Because you haven't offered anything new...

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Notice that law isn't exempt

[shystershep]

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.

Re:Protects work not data

[zurab]

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.

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!

Re:Notice that law isn't exempt

[Ironica]

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.