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

Doesn't matter

[Foofoobar]

There was already a judicial case which established that though you can claim a copyright on your database, you cannot copyright the collection of data.

The case I speak of was with telephone databases. One sued the other because he had used the exact same data and the judge ruled that while the data was the same, the databases differed in how they delivered the data and how they were set up.

So yes, your database schema and layout may be copyrightable but not the contained data.