Slashdot Mirror
Do You Have A License For Those Facts?
spikedvodka writes "Wired is reporting that the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261)" is under consideration. It passed the house Judiciary Committee, and is on it's way to the Commerce Committee. This bill would allow companies to copyright databases. (Think phone-number databases) and goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact." (See this earlier posting.)
So all I have to do is "Download the Internet" as Comcast's ads claim, then I can OWN the internet! Woohoo, where's my multi-terebyte disk array!
at LISNews (kind of the /. for librarians...)
Does /. have the legal right to talk about this bill? I mean, that fact might be copyrighted!
Can I demand an immunity deal as a condition of testifying at all?
I can see it now. An office with 2 lines. The first to file you copyright and the second to file a lawsuit against someone for violating your new copyright.
Evolution or ID?
Who has the copyright to copyright a copyright? :P
Geez. This really is getting out of hand. Copyrights (despite the fact that scholars have said that copyrights are getting out of hand) being handed out, crazy patents, SCO's antics, the DMCA, Patriot Act..
Are we legislating ourselves out of existance faster than we know it?
Corporations will squeeze every last damn cent they can out of anyone. When will the government stop this capitalism run amok? I'm all for corporations making profits, and the government helping protect this, but what is happening is that the small guy (consumers and small businesses who don't have millions of dollars to blow on lawsuits) gets hurt.
This seems like mostly the same thing. If this thing does get passed, it will probably be overturned quickly by a court.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
Send a free fax to your Congressmen and Senators here.
That the house (and most other politicans) have thier heads stuck up someone elses wallets.
I know what this is. Lawyers figure they need to make more money off of nothing. They are pushing to find new ways for lawsuits. Isn't most of congress lawyers anyway. They are trying to take over the world one lawsuit at a time.
Evolution or ID?
This is a terrible idea... and that's a fact.
(Please see my lawyers if you'd like to license this fact...)
True enough.
Now. Let's consider the database as a whole.
Do you feel that any database you take the time to put together should have no protection whatseover? As a whole, I mean..
We can probably agree that wholesale copying of my database should not be allowed... even if the individual facts are not copyrightable.
The question becomes, where do we draw the line? Should the DB owner get no protection?
from the permitted acts section: (a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce. so fear not, you'll still be able to get that cute girl's phone number once you learn her name.
-ninjaneer
We should be moving toward more open sharing of information, not the opposite. All we'll end up with is a dearth of new knowledge. It will be like pouring hot salt water into the gears; eventually it will rust up and grind to a halt.
As usual, everyone should write to their congress critters and register their opinions.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
"BSD Is Dying. That's a fact." All you trolls owe me $50 every time you use that line now.
legislating our selves into a ridiculous shit can (i.e rabit hole) that I'm sure looks stellar to any one out side of the U.S.
Your lame saying here.
Please somebody explain it to me. As far as I can see, this Act is valid only for the USA. I guess some "googlebot" launched outside the US could grab the info and show it.
I see this Act valid for some databases, but I can't see it applicable in the Internet.
As I said, this law stuff is too much to me. Any help would be great.
Now I am sad.
SCO would love the idea.
SCO could put a dictionary file in a database, and then sue everyone for using their information.
Or they'll just start nailing people for using the letters "S" "C" or "O".
Microsoft would have 4 counts against them immediately.
This bill would allow companies to copyright databases and goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact." Um sure, just like current copyright law for books goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a word? What planet are you from.
I think I figured out SCO's copyright claims. They must have entered all the Linux source into a database. So then it's true, they do own Linux!
all the phone numbers of employees of
1. credit card companies
2. free vacation offers
3. home mortage companies
so I can harass them back...
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Some laws are copyrighted, and you need to pay hundreds of dollars just to get a copy of that law.
No, Im not kidding.
There _was_ someone who tried to fight this by posting the laws online, but I am unsure what happened.
no
(c)SoupGuru Enterprises. Any use other than that expressly granted by the copyright holder is forbidden.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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Licenses to use any of the information on my copyrighted list are available now at very reasonable rates. Discounts are available for bulk users. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Neal Stephenson!
Next, they're going to license opinions.
I'm doomed! Doomed, I tell you! DOOMED!
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
We taxpayers pay the government to collect and generate lots of information (e.g. Census Data, Economic Data, the Federal Register).
To make more money , politicians and corporations have been looking for ways to turn that freely available public information into a profit making enterprise. Business owned copyrights give direct profit for the corporations, and indirect profit for the politicians, who accept bribes^D^D^D^D^D^D campaign contributions.
In the past, proposed laws have made adding page numbers, covers, etc to a document enough to put a stamp of copyright on it.
Thank goodness for "activist judges" who recognize that what we pay for is ours, and not theirs.
Presumably if a company wants to claim intellectual property rights over, for example, a consumer information database, they will pay me for use of information about me. I happen to keep quite a lot of data in various records. I would be willing license use of this information to other database providers for a small payment. Kidding aside, if they are going to claim some form of rights over data and not just how it is presented, they are going to have recognise the interests of individual data subjects.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
This bill would be the end of libraries as we know them. Other than copyrighted books, there's not much they would be able to have in their collections. How could they afford what would be the new astronomical prices of those indexes and journals once the 'fact tax' is paid to all the corporations that claim ownership to the facts?
It doesn't mean you can't quote a fact from an almanac, just that you can't steal large portions and claim them as yours.
A dictionary is like a database of words. The dictionary provider doesn't own the particular words, they own the collection of them. Sometimes dictionary makers put false words in there to catch competitors stealing their lists.
Putting together a database can be very hard work and if someone can just rip off the whole thing, it makes providers think twice before they bother to do it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Isn't a phone book a kind of data base?
He also says that despite Kupferschmid's characterization, the bill puts no limit on the amount of information someone needs to take from a database to violate the law.
So if I write down a phone number out of a phone book would I be thrown in a pound me in the ass prison
i am we todd did... i am sofa king we todd did
It really makes a lot of sense. We already have copyrights on parts of dna of different species and this bill just seems like natural extension. The concepts of property and ownership will continue expand until all particles, ideas and what not will carry some kind of ownership label. That is gonna be fun.
I don't think it's too hard to see the difference between bare facts and a useful collection of those facts. Saying that copyrighting a database amounts to copyrighting facts is like saying that copyrighting a book amounts to copyrighting words.
As long as *individuals* can also copyright information, it's okay by me. Build up a db of info about me, copyright it, BAM, I can sue people/companies with my personal information.
Sounds like Webster's is in for a big payday. Every word is now owned by them.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
"The sky is Blue."(C)
(C) International Business Machines, Inc. 2004
The idea that says that you can't own ideas is copyrighted, anyone to speak for or against will be promptly incinerated.
Copyright the copyrighted copyrights, and then sue all the copyrighters under you. or:
1. Copyright Copyrights
2. File lawsuit against the "Copyright Infringers"
3. ???
4. Profit!
The ACM had a vote (in which I voted) about this very issue. The vote was in responce to this bill and used it as an example, but the concept that we (the members of the ACM) were deciding was generalized. The winning opionion by far was that current legislation already offers sufficient protection. As such, additional legislation can only be rudundant or bad.
So in order to actually pass this bill, both houses need to consider why a huge organization of professionals (as opposed to some slashdotters and pirates) are against it.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
It was reported out of the Commerce Committee today. 2 versions, one that codifies the HotNews case, and is very mild based on common law precedent (and pretty much how the courts currently interpret these issues), and the more onerous one which was reported unfavorably. So it looks like it may be stalled and not reach the floor.
This is a good thing!
Register yourself as a company.
Make a database of your personal information (Name, phone number, address, family history, etc).
Sue other companies for using your "copyrighted data", which is held by your company.
Profit! (For the lawyers anyway)
=Smidge=
It seems to be like this is more about copyrighting collections of facts than the facts themselves. For example, if it is a trivial collection of facts (for example, the collection of information "My name is Foo"), I don't believe it is coverable. Thusly, the companies couldn't copyright a pairing between you and your phone number and then sue you for giving your number out. Similarly, a maker of encyclopedias couldn't copyright the fact "The marmot is a mammal." and then sue other people/companies who also make the claim that marmots are mammals.
In the case of encyclopedias, the collection of information would already be covered by copyright (it is a written work). However, legally, the idea of databases as copyrightable material is a little shakey. Is it a work of art? A written work? It falls under that hard to define region of 'other' works of authorship. The law aims to clarify this.
Oh, and make the overlords happy.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major-perhaps the major-stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
- Jean Francois Lyotard (b. 1924), French philosopher. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Introduction (1979).
"The law of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge," Brodsky said.
Actually, I think the law of unintended consequences has been licensed and copyrighted to the Elect Ralph Nader Committee for quite some time now.
If this passes does that mean we will have to license spam-blocking lists and porn-blocking lists? Does the law allow for independent creation of lists which are largely the same?
...create a database of all my own personal information - name, age, phone number, address, credit card numbers, etc. - does that mean I can sue ANYBODY who calls me or otherwise makes use of my personal information without my knowledge or consent? Hmmm... Perhaps I should start a company where I build databases for each person who signs up so that they can claim copyright of themselves and tell telemarketers, etc. to go fsck off!
. . . that this would pass a first amendment test.
I haven't looked at the details of the bill. I am staunch defender of copyleft and I am the first to oppose the current copyright regime. In fact, all of my work is released under a creative commons license.
But, and here's the part where I get sent to burn in karma hell, there are "collections of facts" that should be copyrightable.
Let me give you an example, quality multi-lingual terminological databases and glossaries are multi-year projects that demand a great deal of capital and human labor.
These terms are out there for anyone to do the work and compile them, yet no one will do this kind of tedious and thorough work unless they have a reasonable guarantee of being properly remunerated for their efforts now and into the future.
I would argue that a 10-year copyright period is more than sufficient for this kind of work to thrive.
In an ideal world, universities would band together to create these works and then release them to the public domain, but most universities these days operate as large corporate conglomerates and have very little interest in producing public goods.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Section. 8.
Clause 8: 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;
How does this advance Arts or Science? It's a real stretch to say that a list of customer data is a Writing or a Discovery.
[
"What's wrong with treating "databases" like trade secrets?"
Because like trade secrets, once it's out in the wild. Then you're screwed
The price of Trivial Pursuit will go up exponentially as they begin to be bombarded by invoices from encyclopedia licence owners.
And Jeopardy! will be run into the ground. Each question will cost them a fortune.
A database can be considered intellectual property and a trade secret without being copyrightable, thereby providing any corporation any legitimate protection they may need.
The catch is as soon as you share, your secret isn't a secret any more, and this is where the corporate money-grubers don' want the the process to stop.
IP laws (and the agencies responsible for them) are broken and badly need fixing.
The problem will get worse before it gets better.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
We have a guy who copyrighted a database and ended up selling it back to the company for around $40,000.
He had started as a consultant, and during this time he wrote the backend of a really, really important application and copyrighted the database right before being hired on full time. A month ago he decided that he wanted to go work for another company and he wanted some money for the database he had copyrighted. Now, the company that I work for has a whole staff of full time lawyers who stated his claim was legitimate.
Truth is, the guy could have charged a whole lot more but he figured that the company wouldn't jerk him around as much for $40,000 which is a drop in the bucket.
This doesn't allow you to copyright facts. It even says so in the linked slashdot blurb. It bears some similarities to copyright, but it's a completely different class of law.
The last thing we need is for slashdot to misinform everyone on something that fundamental about the bill.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
... the interesting question is that could this be used by various bio-tech companies to start claiming genomes (of rats or rice or humans) as similar protected 'collected' data. if so, there is an interesting debate to be had there for 'open source' sequencing (mySequence!) and how to make the results available for research. same goes for proteomics and gene expression research. arguably, they are just uncovering 'facts' and the groups they occur in...
Let's see where do I start 10.0.0.1 / 10.0.0.2 / 10.0.0.3...
I will set up on online store where you can purchase your own license at a discount of $699. That's the pre-lawsuit price : )
Dont' make me quote the part of the article that states it is unclear how many individual facts it would take to violate a database copyright.
Companies (and individuals) expend a great deal of time, energy, and resources to compile information. Why should they not be afforded some protection for that effort? The example of legal databases from the article is a perfect one -- it takes time, money, and a large amount of effort to enter cases and decisions into a database. This proposed law will not make those cases copyrighted, but simply the aggregated collection of cases in the database. There's a world of difference.
All this means is that you can't freely copy a set of information compiled by someone else without their permission. Seems fair to me. It's not the facts themselves (e.g. phone numbers, stock quotes etc.) that would be copyrighted, but some specific collection of facts. If you really want a database of stock quotes, you're free to create your own (or ask the copyright holder if you can use theirs).
Is there some exception for government services? I already cannot disclose a name and address from our database, even to police; unless there's been a previous call from that phone number. The existing calls become public record, and are therefore ok to give out to authorized persons or agencies. Will I now have some jackass with money for a lawyer copyrighting our 911 databases, since they're just names, phone numbers, and addresses? Another half-baked law, probably introduced by a half-baked politician who wants a job when they leave office.
"Never pet a burning dog."
June 22nd, 2009
"Back when I was a young geek, there was a common expression called "is that a fact?". Now that's just silly I know, because all the facts in the world was copyrighted in 2004. You know - when I went to school, we got high grades if we got our facts straight. Now after that evil coorporation sued the school system, that's just not the case anymore"
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
The parent post contains "$cientology". Beware!
Lawsuits and gravitational uncouplings will be forthcoming for all who do not comply by ... tomorrow.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I've made the work to collect all the letters of the english alphabet. Here's my resulting collection:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z
Since the collection is now protected by copyright, everyone using a significant number of items from this list now must get my permission. Of course for money.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
All they have to do is seed the data with inconsequential typos and other identifiers. Have a good EULA when they sell the database, and sue the crap out of anyone who steals the data, using the identifiers as evidence. That protects their compilation, while retaining other people's freedom to make their own compilation.
It's the same thing mailing list companies do when they "rent" lists. They have seed names so they can tell when someone makes unauthorized use of the list.
I can understand a company that compiles, edits, cleans and distributes a "phone book" CD-ROM package wanting to prevent someone from just buying one copy, extracting the data and selling it with a different front end. But for them to be able to "own" my phone number is insane.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
The US has always been the land of plenty...where most of the people have a high standard of living and don't have to worry about the basic necessities of life (food/clothing/shelter).
Given these comforts, people are supposed to be happy. I wonder why, then, so many people screw around with frivolous lawsuits (basically an exploitation of an efficient legal system) and overwhelmingly inept laws aimed at increasing profits of commercial entities, etc.
I can see two reasons:
1. People become increasingly selfish/material minded once their basic comforts are provided.
2. A capitalist society encourages companies and individuals to act solely based on profit/commercial gain.
Not a troll...I've been trying to figure out this question for a long time. The land of plenty doesn't necessarily mean the land of happiness/satisfaction.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Everyone see the Farscape episode where the whole world was populated by lawyers? If not, stay tuned. The US will re-enact it for you soon.
Before getting all pissed off, Take a look at the bill. Among other things, it explictly makes allowances for educational and scientific purposes, as well as for news and sports. This isn't about "owning facts", it's about protecting the interests of those who take the time to compile a database and preventing others from obtaining that database and sellling it for themselves. You can sit at an NBA game and edit your web pages in real time, if you want. You can't slurp Yahoo's NBA page, reformat the text, and place it on your own page for profit. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"The more insidious problem is that those who have the money and influence will control the data."
Or maybe the insidious problem is that those who don't want to do the work to create something original, wish to "borrow and benefit"
I realized some time ago that it'd be relatively trivial for someone to come along and scrape all the URLs I link to, put 'em on a page with a buncha ads, and try to make a buck off stuff I'd spent a lot of time on. But I'm not terribly concerned about it happening. Why?
There's no law saying that database output must be presented in a format that's easy for people to scrape, any more than email addresses.
to create some new category regarding information? It seems like everyone has a hard time deciding how things like data fit into existing copyright law, so why not sidestep copyright altogether and create new laws which are more applicable to private and public data stored on the internet?
What does that mean for the .COM and .NET registry database ... ?
Could Verisign copyright them all?
As a whole, I mean..
(IANAL blah blah):
Shouldn't Theft of Services be enough? That law is already in existence and what you're talking about with "as a whole" is really the theft of a service, the service of collecting, collating, and storing facts.
I agree that any database you take the time to put together should indeed have the protection it is already afforded under current law (AFAIK).
What this new law does is turn facts into tangible property, to be bought and sold. Certainly a terrible joke of an idea, and a great way to ensure that poor by design equals ignorant if carried far enough.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I take it that this wouldn't affect SCO's position? Do they have any facts?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest (C) 1997-2004 OSDN. "
The legal system needs a reset button.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
"Everthing is blue in this world." (C)
(C) Trent Reznor (The Downward Spiral)
But, also like trade secrets, you can have contractual arrangements that prohibit licensees from letting the data out into the wild or using it for purposes other than those for which they have been granted express permission. A carefully written contract would be far better than anything Congress can do.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
Good grief, you are correct;
n avby=search&case=/data2/circs/5th/9940632cv0.h tml
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?
Insane.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
In a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that copyright "rewards originality, not effort." That's the principal that needs to be applied. A publisher may spend a lot of time, effort and money promoting (say) a reprint of a book originally published in 1900, but even if the book practically owes its current existence to their hard work, it is still in the public domain.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Joe Friday is gonna be pissed!
In an estimated 49 out of 50 cases, any dealing in collections of facts is "commerce ... among the states."
In my opinion, there's only one answer: amend the US Constitution so that Reps and Sens can only serve two terms (like the President) and limit campaign contributions to $100 per person to each candidate in each election. No PACs, no unions, no companies and no churches, only voters can give.
But of course Congress would kill that in a second.
Rome is burning and George II is just playin' the banjo to some corporations music.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
From GigaLaw:- 2001-04b-all.html
m l
The Great Database Debate
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001-all/isenberg
The DB articles in general (only 3):
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/databases.ht
We must remember that copyrights and patents exist for a single purpose, to foster the growth of knowledge and innovation. There is no abstract "right" for any person to hold a monopoly on ideas or information except as such "rights" foster the growth of knowledge and innovation.
So we must look at this case. Has there been a lack of growth in factual databases due to the inability to profit from them in the same way that, say, the author of a novel can? No, I think not. If then is the case then it seems to undermine the whole enterprise of copyrights and patents altogether. For it seems that if a company can and will go through so much trouble to create a database of phone numbers without any monopoly protection, that lesser efforts will surely happen with or without such protections as well.
So, if these legal monopolies were created for a purpose and they no longer serve to help fulfill that purpose, then what good are they? None at all.
...then the first thing I am doing is assembling all my personal information into a database, copyrighting it, and filing nuisance copyright infringement lawsuits against anyone I don't like who uses the information contained within it.
And I bet I won't be alone. People will do all kinds of nonsensical things to demonstrate how asinine this law is.
you can probably copyright an organization system, but you can't own a fact. facts are just THERE. "the sky is blue"(r) is not property.
in fact, until there are some competent reviewers, I suspect it would be good if all further patents, copyrights, and laws regarding digital matters just freakin' S T O P.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Anyone remember the uproar when the CDDB went from a public database to a private database?
:)
All these public databases....If this law passes I am going to get as many as I can.
So I guess the (high priced) LexisNexis feels threatened by the free information provided by Google et. al.
An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date.
Finally we're getting perpetual ownership of information. It's only a matter of time before it gets put into regular copyrights in order to harmonize the laws. Disney's wet dream come true.
Commercial database companies say they invest millions of dollars in collecting, editing and organizing information for their customers, but don't have adequate protection to prevent someone from stealing the information to compete with them.
To me this is the worst possible justification for a new law. No one made them invest millions of dollars.
And goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact.
You mean like an encyclopedia. We're not exactly establishing precedents here...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Given that the human brain is a data storage and correlation device, and given that it operates on electronic principles, I hereby submit that the facts in my brain are in fact stored in a correlative, referential database using an entropic indexing key. Therefore, presentation of these facts would in fact be a violation of Copyright. Further, since the data is stored in an encrypted form, decrypting that data without expressed written authorization of the creator of that key $DIETY would be a violation of the DMCA.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
are belong to us.
... and yes, I am aware of the irony regarding the usage of the U.S. Army's slogan (An Army of One!).
The EFF provides an easy way to tell your representatives what you think on this. Just go to action.eff.org and it will let you send comments to the government. Be sure to put your personal thoughts in the comments because they give more weight to non-form letters.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Google has a database of a large part of the web and usenet. Some of the fields in that database are the pages and images themselves.
Does this mean that Google can have copyright over just about everything online and in the retail sector?
All your pages are belong to Google?
With the current 7 trillion dollar deficit, I suspect that the US administration will side on any legislation that cause taxable economic exchanges without considering what is right or best.
I think folks in the US government are finally waking up to the realization that the productivity gains from technology reduction in price (deflation) rather than as more economic activity. So they are looking at ways to try and create more transactions.
The problem with this type of meddling is that these billions of transactions for phone numbers, basic facts, etc.., will have the result of transferring even more wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Deflation distributes the gains a bit more evenly, but erodes the tax base--bad news for a government with monstrous debts.
"First, the original intent of copyright has nothing to do with allowing creators to realize the fruits of their labor."
While true, you can't have one without the other Pretending otherwise is self-defeating Go ahead, give it a try, prove me wrong.
In order to prove a copyright violation, the accuser have to prove that the work being infringed on was actually copied and only slightly modified. If an author has read a compeitor's book and then released a very similar one, that's a lawsuit. However, If the author claims they've never heard of the accuser's book before the lawsuit, and definitely hasn't read it, then there's no possible copying.
The word "misappropiation" in the title of the bill is the key thing here. What the law is basically about is making sure databases have the same copyright protection as a dictionary, thesaurus, or atlas does on paper.
Paying a group of typists to type every phone number, name, and address in a phone book into your database should't be a legal way of assembling a database. Quoting person's entry is fair use, but using them all isn't fair at all.
1. Create a database of all known laws of physics.
2. Copyright it.
3. Charge people for using gravity.
4. PROFIT!!!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, the fact that everyone is missing has nothing to do with the article in question, because the article in question misses the key point: the only news item from today that is noteworthy is that an alternative bill is being put forward in the House Energy and Commerce Committee that will specifically alter the sections the House Judiciary Committee proposed.
The Wired story is out of date. I'd link to the article in CQ today, but it's restricted. HR3261 will hopefully be beaten by the energy and commerce version, which will bring the database protection under the scope of the FTC, rather than under an individual corporation's scope.
If the DB owner wants to get all his customers to sign a non-disclosure/non-compete agreement and the customers agree then that should be sufficient. However, the bits and bytes of a database are no different than the letters on the page of a book. As long as I give credit to the source there should be no reason my database can't 'quote' yours.
Eat at Joe's.
It is interesting to note that, whereas many have been paranoid about government's intention to censor speech and communication (which are ultimately made possible by the possession of information), now it appears that the right of possession of information may be on the verge of being controlled and censored - but with a twist. The bill would allow private companies to tie our hands while the government washes its own.
They are confusing Value Added service (easy lookup) with information ownership....
WTF? Over?
The actual text of the bill.
And in PDF
It's only 5 pages long and generously spaced, so it shouldn't take you long (on the off chance you'd rather read the actual bill rather than than just arguing based on the posting.)
3. Profit
Sigs are bad for your health.
The problem is that a compilation of facts that cannot be owned is something that can be recreated. Phone numbers are publicly available from many sources. If I create a database that matches name to number, I effectively have the same database as the publisher of the phone book. An overly simplistic illustration, but you get the idea.
If people find out I have this database, how can I prove that I didn't take facts from someone else that created a similar or identical database? It's a silly law because it says that while the individual rows cannot be copyrighted, the table can be. It's even more ambiguous, because it doesn't tell you how many rows have to be in common to constitute infringement. Worse still, being facts, the database could have been compiled de novo and verbatim with no foreknowledge of another's database.
On the other hand. If I keep records of my own affairs and find a third party doing the same, can I turn around and sue that party for duplicating my personal dossier (in whole or in part)? With this law in place, I just might. How often do you think Experian or EquiFax will be sued for infringement? I don't know...
Required: IANAL
You are forgetting the one law that stands above all other laws: Lawyers can damn well do what they please. Copyright laws pretty much don't apply for court evidence. I could not use the copyright law to dismiss the outline I wrote out for my diabolical scheme, even though I paid the $30 to file it with the copyright office.
I doubt this legislation would affect the information in the court (it might affect the ability of people to publish information about the hearing, but not in the court itself), the copyright law would mean that you would have to pay copyright holders of the data you need to prove you are innocent, providing another income opportunities for LAWYERS!!!!!
I accidentally linked to an otherwise fascinating bill awarding congressional gold medal to Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. The correct links:
Text
PDF
Corporations like e.g. Factset or QSM maintain huge databases of valuable empirical information that gives them the competitive edge and I can see how this law rightfully so protects such information. This also benefits users in that email-harvesters and crawlers that sometimes get sensitive information will be discouraged.
If everything is open, computers wouldn't exist today. Competition is essential for the advancement of technology.
Apparently what this bill tries to do is to protect the database as it would protect a history book. By writing a history book you don't have the copyright over each fact listed in your book, but over the book as a whole, or in big portions of it. Both the history book and the database are an assembly of factual information (with some errors and mistakes here and there). Both the database and the book require several hours of work.
My opinion goes against this bill,
Diego Rey
PS: I think that the thing that makes them different is that a history book, as factual as it can seem, has a lot of the author's personality. A database holds nothing more than facts.
diegoT
" All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest (C) 1997-2004 OSDN."
"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
And the actual bill is 22 pages long, not 5. It only takes 5 pages to award a Congressional gold medal, but 22 whole pages to introduce a brand new form of copyright.
I'm going out to copywright Google! All your urls are belong to us!
Gotta move
Does anyone have a link to the real bill?
I want to examine it for the feasibility of placing my address and phone number into such a database, possibility together with other people (to reach some "size" criterion), and claim that since the facts in this database are copyrighted, nobody may use them against my(/our) will.
As the copyright laws get more and more snarled, it may get more and more messy, but that means there will be more and more opportunities to do GPL-style judo against the "status quo", using their own restrictive regimes against them.
bow to laisee faire.
great argument against corporate socialism
Think a little bit... who can profit of a judgment that permit the copyright of databases?
Lawyers of course!
In america, so called "justice" is a market like everithing else.
"Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
Section 3(a)(1) requires that "generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time".
"Substantial", of course, is undefined, but I wonder if this means that a company's catalogs would be included, or not. While it would take me great effort to suck in Wal Mart's entire pricing structure, they presumably get it pretty easily.
Sorry, but someone had to say it.
Here's real campaign finance reform.
1. Only people who can vote (registered) for a candidate can donate money to that candidate. This would keep corporate money, out-of-district money, and out-of-state money out of the election.
2. Only people registered with a party could donate money to that party. Partys could not give money to candidates; they could only use the money to recruit new members, run issue ads, and finance their conventions (i.e. party business).
3. No limit on the amount of money a person could contribute. Only exception would be a percent of annual income, say, 10%. This would keep rich people from donating money in the names of poor people. (If Joe Sixpack donates a million dollars given to him by his boss, but earned only $18,000 last year, both could be prosecuted under election laws.)
4. No limit on spending by a candidate with donated money. Limit spending his own money to 10% of annual income.
5. Full and immediate disclosure of all sources of donations. This would let the voters see exactly who is trying to buy a candidate and let them decide accordingly.
So, if I were running for mayor of Anytown, USA, I could spend 10% of my annual income and all of the money donated to my campaign by citizens of Anytown who were registered voters. No money would be allowed from out-of-town corporations, etc..
If I were running for the U.S. Senate, I could accept money from any registered voter in my state.
Does money win elections? Ask President Steve Forbes.
The rules outlined above are not perfect, but wiser people than me could tweak them a bit.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
When I read the headline and the short slashdot summary, I hadn't had a chance to think through the issue as thoroughly as I should have. In fact, this portion of the article is downright scary:
"Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date."
So I retract my comments. I have thought it over and it looks like this law would do more harm than good. I would not oppose something that would codify databases if it did so in very careful terms and for no longer than ten years.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
According to 4(a), you don't really own the facts in the database. What you own is the database itself. If I can gather the same facts some other way, I'm entitled to that. I'm only forbidden from accessing your database and using it myself.
"This Act shall not restrict any person from
independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."
That seems fair to me, actually. The goal overall of this bill is to say that if you put forth effort to gather a bunch of data, the effort of gathering it is worth money. The information is free, but the actual gathering of it is an artifact.
It makes a database like a book. Even if you eliminated copyrights, it would still be illegal for you to steal an actual book from me. Obviously the usual arguments that a database is not an artifact apply. I'm not going to argue them here; I'm just pointing out what the bill says.
Libertarians have the right idea on social issues but IMO unregulated business is dangerous to all. For every example of a business "doing the right thing" there are a hundred examples of "screw'em all".
Saying that socialism partly causes corporate fraud is reminds me a bit of the "Chewbacca Defense".
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
The windows filesystem is by definition a hierarchical database, *copyrights all of the windows filenames*
IANAL. Anyway, the article is about a bill, not a court case. Legislation can change rulings by changing the law. So your question depends on which court and which laws this ruling came from. If it is just an interpretation of the Federal Copyright law, then a bill past by Congress should override the previous ruling. If it was actually an interpretation of the Constitution, then after passing the bill, there will probably be a Constitutional challenge. The Constitution says:
This does not preclude lists of facts. Was the ruling you cited from the Supreme Court, and what law did it reference?
...legislating ourselves into a society governed by legitimized racketeering.
This is actually kind of a dumb, extremist reaction to a very useful idea.
First of all, it's not FACTS that are being copyrighted. It's databases. Yes, a database is a collection of facts -- but it's the concept of collection that's being protected here, not the concept of facts.
Think about it this way: you can copyright a guitar riff, but you obviously can't copyright a note. A note is a basic, concrete thing, you can't CREATE a new note. Does this fact bely the creation of original songs? I don't think so...every time music seems stagnant, somebody finds a new way to make it.
In the same way, you can't copyright a word, but you can copyright a book. You can't copyright red, but you can use it in your painting.
The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected. It gives data warehousers the same assurance that other content creators receive, so that they can offer access to their systems without worrying about losing the value...something which in my experience has plagued content creators greatly.
In fact, I see no reason why databases can't be fairly used same as any other created work. For example: let's say I run a sports website. If I wrote an editorial, and you wanted to quote a few lines on your own site, you'd be allowed to. But copy all the text and you're in violation of copyright. It'd be the same with databases. Want to quote a sport score or two? No problem, that's fair. Want to present all of yesterday's results? You'd better ask permission or start compiling them yourself. I don't have a problem with this.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Tell your Representative to oppose unreasonable database protection.
A ction.2004-01-29.5078945128
http://www.publicknowledge.org/take-action/Public
...this story was brought to you by the letters "F" and "U" and the number "2", they aren't kidding!!!
"(Think phone-number databases) and goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact." This is not a law that allows someone to have exclusive ownership of a fact. It simply means that you can't steal someone elses database and sell it as your own. Therefore, two competing companies can each have phone books with the same data in them. However, I can't take company A's phone book, copy the white pages, and then start my own company selling with a new yellow pages that ive accumulated for revenue. It takes work to create a specific set of data, and no one should be able to just copy that exact database without your permission. If they independently arrive at the same database, however, that is ok, and the law in question does not consider this wrong.
Vote for Pedro
I'd call (202) 456-1414 to complain, but the RIAA would then be after me.
The weather for today is heavy rain, with a chance of flooding, or not. We really can't compare this storm to ones we have had in the past. This station can not afford to check the past weather history for this area because we can not afford the costs to access the database. Maybe this is normal, maybe you should head for higher ground, we just don't know. Good Luck.
With in 50 years we will see the return of the slavery. Only this time, this will be based legal cases. I see it coming.
In fact, I see no reason why databases can't be fairly used same as any other created work
You can't??? How about the fact that practically all other creative work is STATIC, and most databases are DYNAMIC??? See the problem now? It's relatively easy to define a copied work of a static object, but how do you define a copy of a dynamic object? It would be a nightmare. This is a serious problem.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
if the law is anything similar to the European database directive, you do not benefit from a direct copytight on all of the facts contained in the database.
Rather the law recognizes that a lot of effort goes into making a proper crosslinked, searchable and enhanced DB, even if it only contains facts.
For instance, try searching an academic paper on CiteSeer , now isn't that much better than doing it the the old way.
CiteSeer doesn't claim to own copyright of all those documents but the DB, it's layout, structure and organization sure is copyrighted (and rightfully so IMHO).
Well..I might be damaged from working in the field of intellectual property (and everything I wrote is of course only my personal opinion by the way) =)
Sweat of the brow doesn't hack it when qualifying for copyright -- creativity is all that counts. The format and layout of someone's collections of facts can be copyright, just not the facts themselves. Databases are best protected by limited access and usage contracts and further supported by Trade Mark protections (such as The New York Times Best Sellers List). Let's not go messing with a new type of indefinite copyright for something that isn't creative. That's what contract law is for ...
"It is entirely within the realm of possibility that any amount of copyright protection no matter how slight would trade off part of the second goal while realizing nothing in regards to the first; possibly even a decline in creation."
Possibley, but the agreement is for the public (aggregate) good. The odds favoured the rewarding of both the individual and society (until copyright was perverted)
"You forget that some artists are willing to work without compensation."
Depends on how you define "fruits". People are rarely that alturistic that they don't get some kind of compensation, be it a "feel good" feeling, or money.
A reciprocal relationship MUST exist. Human nature demands it.
"I don't think that things are so bad as to mandate the abolishment of copyright, but it does need to be massively scaled back. This will result in a diminution in the fortunes of authors, but an overall improvement in the public good. I sympathize with authors, but not at a net cost to myself or the rest of the world. They're not that important. (And I _am_ an artist)"
That's an easy statement for people to make, for people have rarely done without. When the world no longer has artists (of any kind) then you can argue weither artists are important. IMHO they are important to any society.
And that's a Fact(C)!
Please. Every time a band plays a song they wrote, it's subtly different. This doesn't mean that a live version of a song has no copyright. Nor does it mean that you can change a few words of a novel and be free of copyright fears.
In fact, I'd say it would be impossible to have copyright at all if your type of definition were essential to copyright law. Luckily, it isn't. In fact, the definition is quite loose and most analysis of derivation is performed by the courts. Database copyright would be the same, but first it has to be declaratively illegal to steal from a database. This requires the law to recognize databases as a copyrightable entity, which is what this is about.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Really, I'm not an idiot. I remember from CS 201 that the definition of "database" is broad enough to cover almost any set of facts.
What is a "database" for the purpose of this act? (yes I'm too lazy to RTFA)
All's true that is mistrusted
> The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected.
Firstly, I'd like to dispute the implication that something is "creative" or somehow intrinsically worthwhile simply because it is difficult. Database construction may or may not be creative, I don't know, but the fact that it's difficult is not evidence one way or the other.
That said, I think I'd be willing to accept conceptual ownership of data collections provided it came with some responsibilities, mainly, database owners should make (enforceable) promises about the integrity of their data. Too many databases just hoover up information and put it in the tables, without ensuring that it correlates with the real world at all. If a database has an owner, then it creates the possibility that someone can be held accountable for the fidelity of the data.
I think this could go a significant distance to easing people's fears about data collection.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Think about it this way: you can copyright a guitar riff, but you obviously can't copyright a note. A note is a basic, concrete thing, you can't CREATE a new note. Does this fact bely the creation of original songs? I don't think so...every time music seems stagnant, somebody finds a new way to make it.
Ok, now if you take your collection of notes, and randomize the order they're in, you have something totally different. Now, take your database, and randomize the records in that. You still have the same exact database. They are two totally different ideas.
eg. We claim the following:
1. Data base entry of a person's details.
2. Database entry as in claim 1 where person's name is Joe SixPack.
3. Database entry as in claim 2 where person lives at 15 Dumbass Drive.
4. Database entry as in claim 3 where person's telephone number is 555-12345678.
5 Database entry as in claim 1 where persons name is Susan Sixpack.....
THen the examiner will need to phone up Joe & Susan Sixpack to verify the facts....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I call 2+2=5.
Double plus good, eh?
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
>> ...goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact.
If you are going to argue against copyright, at least use your head.
A "fact", e.g., "4 +4 = 8" cannot be copyrighted. The symbolic representation of that fact, can be. "4 + 4 = 8" is one symbolic representation of a fact. "IV + IV = IIX" is another. Same fact, different symbols.
Facts aren't symbols. Awareness of facts can only be transmitted by symbolic expression. Those expressions are works of language and, hence, can be owned and protected, i.e., copyrighted.
(Utopian dreamers who want to rant about the wonderful ineffable nature of knowledge and its "unownability", please go away. Copyright isn't about knowledge.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
This bill would allow companies to copyright databases. (Think phone-number databases) and goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact.
Let me make this clear: I believe the database bill to be terrible and dangerous legislation. I also believe that the technical community can be instrumental in helping to stop it.
Let me make this clear as well: If the technical community persists in their decade-long strategy of histrionic "chicken-little" screaming every time a bad bill comes out, we will once again see nothing but bad legislation pass.
This is what happened with DMCA, it is what happened with the Patriot Act changes, and it is now happening again with the database bill. Note that the database legislation was originally attached to DMCA, but withdrawn due to excellent lobbying. That can and should happen again, unless we screw up the way we did with DMCA.
Meaningless or false statement (depending how you define terms) such as the ones above serve noone but those who support the bill. The bill does not provide copyright protections (it is a different kind of right, both less and more in different ways), nor does it provide ownership of "facts."
Oh, yes. There are probably rationalizations that foolish people might proffer to defend these remarks, but by the time they have finished confusing those who do not need to be converted, they have long since lost credibility, and the attention of every relevant legislator or person who might otherwise have moved favorably from the fence.
So, please, oh please! STOP THE MADNESS. Remember the line from Apollo 13: "Gentlemen we are not going to do this, we're not going to go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes because were just going to end up right back here with the same problems."
If you are interested in this, and you should be, take the time to read the bill and learn what there is to worry about. Don't oppose it as a knee-jerk, and focus on what is wrong with the bill. Maybe it can be completely defeated, maybe not. But it will never be defeated, and like DMCA, is far more likely to be passed entirely, unless we show an intelligent, balanced and "straight-shooting" front.
The bill needs to be defeated. I assure you that remarks like the foregoing are not the way to do it.
Greenspan outlined fairly clearly to congress just recently that this is the direction the u.s. needs to move. Moving from a tangible asset based economy to one that depends on "IP", at least protecting IP assets seems to be the intended MO here.....
This bill is contrary to the standard ideals of most slashdot readers but it will pass, its inevitable.
Read here, near the end of the article..
Greenspan talks to congress
I am a huge database containing data organized in a complex biological pattern of questions and answers.
Some right - some wrong - some ridiculous.
But that doesn't matter - it is a database anyway.
And while we are at it - I would like to copyright 2005 calenderwise. I will make one and you ALL have to pay royalty if you use any day of that year.
Hmm - what about personal information? I know what I bought at the store. The store will now being infringing on my copyright since they are copying my database into theirs?
This message is subject to the GPL. You may copy it.
You're not thinking in levels of granularity.
If you randomize the order of notes, you have something totally difference. In the same way, if you randomize the FIELDS in a database -- take a NAME from one record and put it in the ADDRESS of another -- you would come up with a completely different database.
If you "randomize the records in a database," you're not doing the same thing as randomizing notes. You're doing the same thing that hip-hop artists do when they sample...and that activity has been declared by the courts in violation of copyright.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
In the case of copyrighted building codes being made into public domain laws, the courts have come down on the side of the public domain. This seems sensible, IMHO.
However, this should fall under Amendment V: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". Up until the point when the code is made law, the copyright is private property; after, it becomes public property.
Of course, this is (IMHO, IANAL) somewhat different from the case of an assembage of facts (such as the phone book) that is intrinsically uncopyrightable, as opposed to uncopyrightable because of the need for the law to be accessable. Eldred v Ashcroft gives a dim view of the chances of this being knocked down if it does become law.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
No, but you can trademark it. It is legally acceptable to own a trademark on a color. I discovered this when I was looking at an issue of Inside UPS (a magazine for UPS employees) and noticed on the back that it said to the effect, "UPS, the package logo, the shield logo, and the color brown are all trademarks of United Parcel Service, Inc." This was quite a shock to me, so I ran to Google and found that the Supreme Court allows color to be registered as a trademark. A color can't be part of the function of a product in order to be trademarked, however. So we're safe from someone suing stainless steel manufacturers because they own a trademark on the color silver.
Suppose you "copyright" the first hundred million digits of PI. You put them in a database. Are you saying that it's ok to prevent me from calculating my own hundred million digits of PI? This is ludicrous, but you can't deny that digits of PI are indeed facts and can be put in a dictionary. So your "reasonable" analysis is really (probably unwittingly) justifying a truly evil proposition.
If one can copyright a riff, assuming a range of ten physically possible frets can be held in a chord, on a bass guitar, you get 10^4 chords per fret range. 22 frets, so 13 different ranges of ten frets, so 13*10^4 possibly chords. Assuming you can copyright a riff with as few as 4 chords, you could copyright 13^4*10^16 chords, and then sue all bassists, because (together, now)...
All your bass are belong to us.
I didn't meant to imply that database creation is creative because it's difficult. I meant that original effort goes into its assembly, and the result of that effort is a often a new creation, even if no visible changes have been made to the original data. It's creative because it takes a basic structure and creates a more complex one with different meaning.
Say I have a list of names , and another list of colours. If I make an association between the names and the colors, I have created something new, even if I didn't create the colors and I didn't create the names. You can now get a list of names that are associated with the color blue. That association is my creation. This new law would say that I own the association. It doesn't say that I own the names and colors.
And as for That said, I think I'd be willing to accept conceptual ownership of data collections provided it came with some responsibilities, mainly, database owners should make (enforceable) promises about the integrity of their data: ownership is not the same as copyright. You don't have to have accurate data to copyright a book...you could copyright a book comprised entirely of lies. Anne Coulter has done it several times. All copyright does is say "I made this. You can make your own, but you can't copy mine unless I say you can." Ownership of data is something completely different...something that's very difficult in a digital environment.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
That's right people, from now on, when you install a default SQL Database (read: empty), you OWE me $1200 licensing fee's as I've patented the idea of having an "EMPTY" and/or "DEFAULT" database. Also I've patented any database named "TEST" or "DEV". Send your payments to me so I can get taxed 55% by my gov't.
I also plan on patenting the subject line "FIRST POST!!!" - BEWARE!
Thanks.
-Patent pending-
Mod +5 Drunk
The United States government does not claim any copyrights whatsoever for any of its original work. This includes anything produced by the Congress, like reports, studies, rules, reports, and LAWS.
Besides, it appears that the Fifth Circuit (the most conservative one out there) actually held the opposite of what you are implying.
So cloning would become illegal under copyright law, as well as whatever else might make it illegal... kewl.
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
One can copyright a riff. The trick here is that the riff must be central to the piece and sufficiently complex as to convince a jury nobody else could come up with it.
So if you were planning on arguing that people owe you licensing fees for your database of in order prime numbers, you'd be out of luck. No jury would let you get away with it...I hope.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
>First of all, it's not FACTS that are being copyrighted. It's databases. Yes, a database is a collection of facts -- but it's the concept of collection that's being protected here, not the concept of facts.
0 4. html
Well, if it is just the collection, then you can just give me the facts from your collection, in any order you like. I dont think that is what is being requested... companies dont want to have to give out the facts that they have in their collection...
>The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it
So are all databases creative works? Not all, but all of yours? Is it possible to create a database that isnt creative?
>takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected.
So if I spend "TREMENDOUS" effort, I should be guaranteed a government granted monopoly? Where does the constitution mention anything about effort in the copyright clause ? I see stuff about progress of arts and science, but progress is not measured by just how much work it takes to achieve something.
>It gives data warehousers the same assurance that other content creators receive, so that they can offer access to their systems without worrying about losing the value...something which in my experience has plagued content creators greatly.
Some discussion on alternatives to absolute control by default are here:
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/0022
the point being that there are many existing tools for restricting access to databases and those should be reviewed before insisting on a control mechanism that treats any accessing of information in a database as a violation.
>If I wrote an editorial, and you wanted to quote a few lines on your own site, you'd be allowed to. But copy all the text and you're in violation of copyright.
Agreed. Your editorial may contain facts, opinions or both. I am free to quote from your work, independent of the contents of the quote to the extent that the law allows under the Fair Use provision.
>It'd be the same with databases. Want to quote a sport score or two? No problem, that's fair. Want to present all of yesterday's results? You'd better ask permission or start compiling them yourself.
No, it is not the same. The "score" is a fact. How can including a fact in a database suddenly make it copyrightable? Your editorial as a whole is copyrighted no matter if it is on paper, in an email, or in a database. If a fact cannot be copyrighted then including a fact in a database cant make the fact copyrightable.
Imagine the world where you could be able to do so... pay someone to access numbers ? 2+2=4 ? you need to pay someone to get that fact ? No, instead we have other ways by which owners of massive databases can create revenue... many database include contracts and licensing that dictates how the information may be used, etc.
You deserve a +10!
It's a fact, nobody can own a fact.
This comment copyright me, and that's a fact. Use it and die.
http://mediagoblin.org/
It seems to me that one of the major problems is that the concept of public domain is going away at a very rapid pace. The database is just another part of that but most people don't understand and they don't want to.
So you have to bring it down to their level. I think that "Happy Birthday" should be in the public domain. So is "God Bless America." Did congress even considering asking about copyrights before they were on the steps singing it to an audience of billions (based on world wide tv coverage)? As congress critters are now answering questions in public, it might be a good question to ask.
Back to Happy Birthday... Who here has ever heard of live performance by the author of that song? Who learned the song from copyrighted sheet music? I contend that the vast numbers of people who have no idea that it is even copyright is very strong proof that it is in the public domain.
The odds of getting sued for singing "Happy Brithyday" to someone is very, very small but the RIAA has gone after 12 yr olds in the past. Is that song worth your life savings? If more people understood that, then congress would be forced to protect the public domain.
Maybe I don't quite understand the issue.
But I don't think I understand why this is so eeevvviiilll.
I can argue that a book is nothing but a collection of words placed in a certain order, and no one seems to have a problem with me holding rights to a book I wrote. I don't own the words and punctuation, I do own the order of the words though.
If I assemble a database, any database and I go through the trouble of putting data in it, legaly obtained data - then why shouldn't I have a right to that particular assemblage of data?
If you have a need of the exact same data assembled in the same fashion then you can either license it from me, or assemble it from scratch yourself. Useing the shortcut of downloading my database should only be an option if I allow it.
And since when are facts and statistics free anyways? Think Neilson does there thing as charity work? How about polling groups? Think that data is free? I am sure that if you asked them they would have no problem saying that if you don't want to pay them you can go through the trouble of getting the data on your own.
Copying what I wrote from the last time, I'm continually amused at the people who are disagreeing with you. Basically, all this bill is proposing to do is punish BLATANT direct copies of a database or large portion thereof. Note the following exceptions to the law, from the last time I looked at it:
SEC. 4. PERMITTED ACTS.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce.
(b) ACTS OF MAKING AVAILABLE IN COMMERCE BY NONPROFIT EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC, OR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS- The making available in commerce of a substantial part of a database by a nonprofit educational, scientific, and research institution, including an employee or agent of such institution acting within the scope of such employment or agency, for nonprofit educational, scientific, and research purposes shall not be prohibited by section 3 if the court determines that the making available in commerce of the information in the database is reasonable under the circumstances, taking into consideration the customary practices associated with such uses of such database by nonprofit educational, scientific, or research institutions and other factors that the court determines relevant.
(c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of hyperlinking of one online location to another or the providing of a reference or pointer (including such reference or pointer in a directory or index) to a database.
(d) NEWS REPORTING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict any person from making available in commerce information for the primary purpose of news reporting, including news and sports gathering, dissemination, and comment, unless the information is time sensitive and has been gathered by a news reporting entity, and making available in commerce the information is part of a consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct competition.
I won't annoy all of you by requote the whole text of the bill (which I highly recommend you read before flaming). However, from my reading of it, all it seems to prohibit is for someone to make available significant amounts of a commercial database for their own profit. Basically, you can't spider Lexis-Nexis or the like and sell the info, but you CAN independently collect that data from direct sources and compete with them.
If I'm missing something here, PLEASE tell me. Again, read the bill first though, before you spew fire.
If I make of business of compiling facts, I need some means of preventing my clients from reselling these facts and undercutting my business, because like the music industry implies, I'll have only one customer who will then resell that data at a slightly lower price, who will in turn resell that data at a slightly lower price.
Problem is, what if you copyright a database of all the US Senators e-mail addresses. Does that mean I can't gather that publicly available information and publish it without paying you? What is the line where a list of facts becomes a "creative work" deserving a copyright? Can Google claim a copyright to the web, since their Index is a database of "Facts" and "Useful data relationships" forcing other search engines to pay royalties? Does Major League Baseball own a copyright on the Box scores? On Team statistics?
Now, my company relies on collecting "facts" and "establishing useful data relationships", and maybe with the right caveats, exemptions, etc. this might be a useful bill. Problem is we'd have to rely on Congress understanding all the implications of this law on current and future technology, and I just don't think they or anyone else is up to it.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Trademark isn't copyright. All trademark means is that nobody else in a similar industry can use that color, name, logo, or idea in their marketing, and thus ride your coattails while confusing your customers. Trademark is really to the benefit of consumers -- it clears the marketplace of the sheisty. Copyright is more to the benefit of content creators.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I believe Paul Klee trademarked the particular shade of blue used in many of his paintings, calling it Klee Blue(TM). I think I learned this at a gallery sometime, but I can't find any indication of this fact on Google. Maybe the fact itself is copyrighted. :)
First of all, it's not FACTS that are being copyrighted. It's databases. Yes, a database is a collection of facts -- but it's the concept of collection that's being protected here, not the concept of facts.
/usr/dict/words. Not even so much as providing definitions but rather just including every word.
Except copyright protection exists over a work both in whole and in part. As a whole it is the entire collection; but as parts they are again just facts. And fair use avoids declaring any specific fraction of any work as fair use.
If facts are akin to words, a database of facts is but
And certain facts are really big words. Like Disney claiming a copyright on supercalifragilisticespialidocious (they probably already have a trademark on it, but that's a digression). If a single fact is big enough, or important enough, you'd be sure someone would seek its individual protection as an illegal excerpt from their database.
What is considered fair is often at the whim of the rights holder, and only challenged if you can afford to do so. And still you need to check whether the political climate is conducive to doing so (see 2600 Magazine's DeCSS case).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
you can already copyright compilations. So, this is nothing new, nothing earth shattering and won't change anything...
Are you saying that it's ok to prevent me from calculating my own hundred million digits of PI?
Did you "create" the first hundred million digits of Pi?
No, you didn't. Therefore, you can't copyright them any more than you can copyright the works Mozart.
Furthermore, a database is not merely a list of facts. A database is a compilation of facts from different sources. It creates new information in the form of associations, associations that did not exist in the original sources. Your "copyrighting pi" is not creating a database. Besides, copyright violation is a civil matter, meaning that you would have to legally sue for damages. No judge would grant your rights to the digits in pi...just like no judge would allow you to claim copyright on an "A" chord.
Besides, generating your own hundred million digits of pi would be the creating of a new database...and since there's obvious methods for you to come up with Pi without violation the other database's copyright, you'd still be fine.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
He's also implying slashdotters should not jump to paranoid extremist conclusions based on Orwellian fancy.
He must be new.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Huh? Howzat? Ever heard about the Internet? Do you know what the "perl language" is? No, it doesn't take any effort at all, unless you consider that CPU cycles are "effort".
Want to quote a sport score or two? No problem, that's fair. Want to present all of yesterday's results? You'd better ask permission or start compiling them yourself.
That's exactly the problem. A copyright can be proved rather easily, just showing the two works proves they are identical. However how can you prove that somebody copied from your database some data that are available over the internet? I can easily write a script that scans the news sites to get all the sports scores for the day. It wouldn't be much more difficult or expensive than copying from your database. So what's the point? In fact, it's often the opposite that's commercially interesting: people pay you to put their data into your database, and you encourage everyone to copy it. Think Yellow Pages, for instance. At least where I live, the Yellow Pages are given out freely, but you pay to put ads in them.
You can now get a list of names that are associated with the color blue. That association is my creation. This new law would say that I own the association. It doesn't say that I own the names and colors.
Yet you suggest that you would now own the association "sky is [blue]".
Your associations are still just facts, which would be discoverable by anyone willing to put forth their own resources. You haven't created something new, only collected a bunch of facts to create new facts.
That you cannot copyright a collection of facts is because anyone else can collect them for themselves but be barred from sharing their independent collection for which they exerted their own efforts just because you got there first.
It's bringing the worst parts of patent law to bear in protection of databases.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What is considered fair is often at the whim of the rights holder
No, fair use is at the whim of the courts. The right to pursue you for possible violations is up to the rights holder.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
So slashdot people bitch about it when too much information is being collected in databases which you don't want people to have about you. And you bitch about it when the government might protect people against having their databases copied. Do you want the free flow of information or not? Pick one and stick with it you whiney bastards.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
While the links at the site mentioned are all biased against this legislation, and many of those links provide only knee-jerk, "the sky is falling", "keep your hands off my facts" reactions (e.g. Phyllis Schlafly's) so typical to slashdot responses found here, there is at least one lucid presentation of the situation. Anyone really interested in this topic should at least read William A. Wulf's testimony. He summarizes the problem well. Here's my summary of the problem (not the testimony).
1. NOBODY is trying to COPYRIGHT ANYTHING! NOBODY is trying to OWN FACTS! (Please repeat this to yourself three times before continuing to read anything anywhere)
2. Big database companies (like West) are worried that other companies can slurp up large parts of their data and turn around and sell it. Everyone agrees this is unfair and shouldn't be allowed.
3. Big companies now KNOW that COPYRIGHT DOES NOT PROTECT THEM from situation 2 above because of Feist. (Google it with copyright).
4. Big companies want some law to point to when situation 2 actually happens.
The real problem(s):
a. Situation 2 may not be a real problem. No one has shown that this is actually happening.
b. Big companies (like West) like to sue honest competitors to gain any advantage they can. That's their job. (Google West and Lexis)
c. The new legislation may be addressing a non-problem while facilitating expensive, unnecessary lawsuits designed to harass competition.
d. (The big one for me) The new legislation may chill the activities of companies like Google who might inadvertently become liable.
Hey man, can I bum a sig?
As long as what goes to courts is determined by who can afford to take it there, and the penalties continue to be excessive for the infringer, what is fair will always be at the whim of the accuser.
See the RIAA v. their customers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Your associations are still just facts, which would be discoverable by anyone willing to put forth their own resources.
Uh huh. And if they want to do just that, they'd be welcome to. But they better be prepared to prove that they produced their work without stealing it from my database. Which shouldn't be too hard if they didn't...because my database has trick data in it, similar to the nonexistant streets inserted into copyrighted maps to check for infringement.
See, patent law says that you can't create anything new that looks like my product...but copyright law just says they can't take MY database and call it theirs. It's still up to me to prove they're infringing.
This law is giving databases the same rights as all other content. I have no problem with that.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The general idea behind this bill is maybe, possibly, OK in a grey-area sort of way, but my serious complaint against this is that the bill is terribly written. It is so dangerously un-specific as to be easily abused. I really hope this can be stopped because this could be legislative disaster on the scale of the DMCA.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
When I look back on history, Mankind has grown only when the free exchange of information was enabled. Progress was slow for us until we invented the written word. Things moved at a breakneck speed, compared to the past, after that. Then came the printing press. Now we could get the "Combined Human Knowledge" out to the masses. We now have the ability to share information instantaneously. We have arrived. As long as we keep the flow of Information FREE for EVERYONE, we will prosper and flourish. If it goes away, we will wither and die. Pay attention. I don't see why or when the American people asked the government to favor the rights of corporations over citizens. Why are they involved? Why do they care?
The OED is the standard arbiter for scrabble (at least in my grandmother's home.) If the OED introduced false words to catch out those who copy its work, those words might be usable in scrabble. Except that presumably the made-up words would be copy-rightable, and their use restricted, in order to be able to prosecute the copiers. So they wouldn't be usable in scrabble, because technically it'd be an infringement to use them at all.
So they'd have to be marked somehow, in the dictionary, soas not to be confused with words that could be used in scrabble - because that might be considered entrapment. So they'd have to come up with a word that meant 'a false word; not usable in a scrabble context'. And that word would also have to be in the dictionary.
So then you'd have this word that was also created by OED, 'licensed' for public use. And its definition would go something like:
contraverbal (adj.) - false (of words); not usable in a scrabble context.
[apologies to lingusts; I'm sure there are much better constructs for this definition]
So would this word be a valid word for scrabble?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
It is really hard to filter out the irrelevant comments caused by the sensationalistic headline.
No, facts are still not going to be copyrightable (just collections of them). So why imply that they will be in headline?
Now I have to manually skip past the high-rated posts that correct the headline and those insightful ones that explain why it would be bad if the headline were true.
Note that I think that the bill is a bad idea, but I would like to be able to read comments about the actual issue.
Under the proposed law, who's to say what consititues a "datum" in a database? Wouldn't a word be sufficient? Why couldn't the author of a novel (who expended a considerable effort to assemble that particular collection of words), claim the novel is a database and sue someone, who uses the same words in a different novel, for infringement? This is the logical conclusion of such a faulty bill and is, of course, absurd.
Think of it this way: Why shouldn't the various tables of chemical data found in the CRC be subject to copyright? The creative act in building a database, or a book of tables containing factual data, is the act of compiling the facts into a uniquely usable form.
Interestingly enough, judicial opinions are, of course, not subject to copyright. However, the indexing systems used by the publishers of judicial opinions are protected by copyright.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Very few novelists have succeeded by selling single sentences of a novel.
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
An association between data is not a creation; it is a discovery. The relationship was always there, you only found it.
You might be able to patent the methodology used to make the discovery, or own a copyright on the tools used to make the discovery, but the discovery itself is nothing new. It is merely another fact built upon other facts.
I shall coin a paraphrase: "If we have been unable to see further than others, it is because we have been legislatively barred from standing on the shoulders of the corporate giants."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I don't know why anyone thinks that this isn't the case already. People pay good money to retrieve "facts" from information services. The example in the top article was phone numbers. How about TV Listings, UPC codes, traffic jam info, movie listings, even weather climate data (forecasts aren't facts) - all of these things are available in some limited way in advertiser paid form, but people who need that info for a living pay big bucks for it. You can't own a fact, but you sure can make big bucks organizing facts for easy retrieval by others!
You can independently gather US Senators' e-mail addresses on your own, so long as you don't blatently copy my database. This law, if you read it, is meant to protect the effort that went into creating the database, not necessarily the content of the database. So you cannot simply copy my database of US Senators' e-mail addresses and claim it as your own (and then sell it or "otherwise make available in commerce" as the bill requires). If you put your own effort into creating the database, it's yours to sell. Clear now?
The Ezine Directory
If you "randomize the records in a database," you're not doing the same thing as randomizing notes.
Yes, you are. A collection of notes makes a song. A collection of records makes a database. If you want to break it down even more, a collection of fields makes a recordset. The notes have to be in a specific order to make a specific song, but the fields in the recordset can be in any order, and the recordsets can be in any order in the database, and you will still have the same database.
In the same way, if you randomize the FIELDS in a database -- take a NAME from one record and put it in the ADDRESS of another -- you would come up with a completely different database.
Yes, and that database would be absolutely worthless. Having data in the wrong fields makes the database dirty, and the data unuseable. Imagine taking a note from a song, and putting that note in the lyrics.
Now, if you meant changing the order of the fields in a recordset, we're back to the same argument in my original post - The database is still fully functional, and you will be able to get the same data out of it.
I wouldn't have thought of the US legal system as particularly efficient. What would be the hallmarks of an efficient legal system? Quick settlement of cases? Few appeals? Few appeals that result in an overturn? Large awards? Small awards? Something I haven't thought of?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
The content (facts) they are selling are court opinions, which are about as far into the public domain as you can get. They add value by correcting judges's mistakes (i.e. in referring to another case) and by adding headings, summaries, cross-references and keywords. It has also been true that some courts have regarded the page numbering in one of the databases (I believe it was WestLaw) as THE way to make references in legal briefs filed before a court. The owners of that database have fought to keep a 'copyright' on their 1, 2, 3 ... page numbering, absurd as that sounds.
Their additions are helpful to busy lawyers and are in some cases something that can be copyrighted. But the real meat of what they're trying to protect is unarguably the text of those court decisions, which they can't own. Someone with WestLaw access can grab those public domain decisions and post them in his own database, charging little or nothing. He can even collect all the decisions that appear under a particular keyword and publish those in some fashion.
I haven't had a chance to read this bill, but I suspect it is an attempt to give copyright-like protection to something that can't in itself be copyrighted. They're attempting to get around a general principle of copyright law that labor itself can't be copyrighted (i.e. the labor of getting copies of court opinions), only the creative element (i.e. keywords and summaries).
I can offer a parallel. I've published books (i.e. The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective) that bring together public domain magazine texts from a particular era to show how the debate on a particular topic (i.e. birth control) developed over time. When I applied for a copyright for that book, I had to be careful to state that all I was copyrighting was the particular arrangement of those articles in my book and my modern-day comments. Other people have as much right to take the text of those old articles from my book as from their original texts. I don't own them. Under copyright law, I can't own them.
But if I understand this bill from the remarks that are being made, if those texts were placed in a database, perhaps of periodical articles, the text itself would acquire a copyright-like protection, including nasty punitive damaages.
That illustrates one of the many problems with this bill. Why should the labor of putting those old texts in a book be less protected than the labor of putting it into an electronic database?
To a great extent this legislation is being driven by the same greed that drove copyright term extension in the late 1990s. And unless we make a fuss, member of Congress from both parties likely to pass this bill, eager to make large donors happy. They could care less about the grief they cause others.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books
http://www.InklingBooks.com/
I already generated a text file containing all numbers from teh 412 area code. They are all mine!
I wonder if I can get RMS to help back the open sourcing of facts!
I thought of another one - did you mean universal availability (where universal means the same as in 'universal suffrage')?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
Heres the skinny on making it time-consuming to scrape:
* Do certain number of results per page (I see your already doing this).
* Have a maximum number of results per IP per time period - make it so it takes 5 years for a particular IP to download your entire DB.
* Implement an offline open proxy checker against incoming IP addresses. If you get an access from an open proxy - block it.
This last one is the killer - you need to make sure that someone scraping your site can't just back up and swap proxies on you.
Unfortunately, the DB_ID redirect thing you are using doesn't really make it anymore difficult for someone to scrape, but it does get rid of the 'drive-by-scrapings'.
HTH
The problem of course is that the two databases of US Senators' e-mail address collected independently will be exactly the same because they consist of the same facts. In other copyright infringment suits, the copied material is used as evidence in determining the case. With the identical databases, you would need some other form of evidence of copying to prove your case of infringment. Not impossible, but much more problematic.
The US government is trying to balance things too much. All these regulations and big government (welfare, social security, millions of stupid little projects to get senators in office) could ruin our county.
The US isn't capitlaist right now, its trying to pull off some bastardized mix of capitalism and socialism. I say pick one and stick with it. Since the country was founded on capitalism lets go with that. If you let all corporations do mostly as they wish (without causing direct harm to people) THAT will "balance" things out eventually.
Sure, some corps sans morals will go and try to "screw'em all" but they'll find real quick this doesn't work out in a free market system. You need friends in a free market, and you need to enrich the lives of your employees and customers.
Adam Smith was on the right track with his "Invisible Hand" theory. Don't know who Adam Smith is? Google it, you'll learn something.
I don't agree.
There's nothing unfair about selling, re-selling, borrowing, or trading facts, in any way shape or form. There is nothing wrong with re-typing 25 pages out of the phone book and then selling them to some schmuck.*
As far as Lexis-Nexis is concerned, there is some concern that their "monopoly" (that's in quotes because it's probably an exaggeration but still mostly true) - their monopoly may already be restricting access to public information. Apparently since you have to pay for Lexis-Nexis, and L-N is the only place to get legal info, that means that poor people simply don't have access to legal info.
*A more likely scenario is that someone would reprint the phone numbers in a phone book and sell advertising space. Who cares? Who really cares about stealing phone numbers from the phone book? Instead of legislating the solution, maybe they should take a cue (sp?) from mapmakers, who have some very crafty ways of protecting the data that they sell.
Here in AUS a few of us are trying to put together a political party to voice the concerns of the IT world.
We want to be more than screaming chickens and are doing something about it.
But we need more members.
http://www.neteffect.org.au/
The best part is that we are in our infancy and you CAN make a difference.
because among other things, it's the one way that SCO could gain credibility for their ABI claims WRT errno.h
Kind of hypocritical that Rep. Coble's homepage mainly features unattributed quotations, plagarism soon to be criminalized by his own Act.
--
make install -not war
Ahhhh didn't John Nash prove Smith was wrong? Smith's idea of "fuck everyone for the dollar and the 'magic hand' will save us all" is total crap. "The Wealth of Nations" was flawed in 1776 and now we have proof.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I'll create a db of my family's personal information, get a copyright paper trail, and C&D anyone who includes my db in THEIR db!
If associations aren't based on subjective quantities, they'd be facts themselves. I'm not sure if this is what you were implying with your example, but say I make a database that is an association of words to colors; that is to say, I show the color blue, and that's associated with the word "blue". That's just a fact, and I don't see how that could be copyrighted, but someone compiled it. How do you determine how much work is necessary, or how unobvious the association has to be before it can be copyrighted?
When you are dealing with populations of data, or even randomly chosen subsets, these associations don't take creativity to make, just work. That's why a painting is copyrihtable, but found art isn't (or shouldn't be.) Painting takes creativity, and found art takes work (to find.) Copyright protects creative work--to me, copyrighting databases of facts is equivalent to scientists patenting genes they found in nature. You may have worked hard to find it, but you still don't own it. it was already there.
does this mean that people will now own opinions?
I stand corrected. Almost everyone agrees. Or maybe "almost all reasonable people".
Who cares about stealing numbers from the phone book? That would be RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO.. At least they cared enough to spend a lot of money on legal fees.
And FYI, there are two BIG web publishers of Legal info: West/Thompson (used to be just West) and LexisNexis and a few smaller ones, like VersusLaw (where I work).
Not a sig, but my fav--
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
Today the Commerce committee voted to support its own version of the bill that is very different than the Judiciary version. The Commerce bill is sponsored by Congressman Stearns and only protects databases in certain circumstances and doesn't allow companies to sure each other. They would have to go through the FTC. The Commerce Committe flatly rejected the Judiciary Bill. Commerce Chairman Barton supports the Stearn bill. According to published reports, Congressman Stearns also believes the Judiciary Bill will "chill the use of information". Co-sponsor Schakowsky also dislikes the Judiciary Bill because it would "turn facts into property." While its not final yet, this was a big victory in this battle.
"To me this is the worst possible justification for a new law. No one made them invest millions of dollars."
And no one will. See how that problem solves itself.
Now tell me how societies progress again? Especially when there's no incentive to do so?
Most copyright lawyers will work on a contingency basis. Meaning if your case will possibly win, and is worth the effort, you'll probably find somebody to help you go to court. Therefore, the rights of the poor content creators are protected. I can play my song "Love is a Null Reference" at a coffeehouse with full understanding that, if somebody recorded it without my consent and it went #1, I could get reimbursed.
Now, if I sued you for using the words "Null Reference," claiming they were my own invention, I'd have to pay for my own lawyer. Nobody'd take THAT case on contingency. Similarly, you'd probably be able to find a lawyer for a countersuit fairly easily.
As for the RIAA, they're suing people for allegedly copying their agencies' copyrighted works without consent. Watch the birdy: they're saying the people they're suing infringed on their artists' copyrights by COPYING without the RIGHTS. Most of these people did exactly that, so copyright is working there, too. Just because it's rude and you don't personally like the agency doesn't mean what it is doing isn't perfectly legal and in fact exactly what copyright was MEANT to be used for.
Argue all you want about the cost of CDs and the artist's cut and the deplorable state of the industry and unfairly copy protected CDs, but if you're making the conscious decision to infringe on a copyrighted work, you should be willing to face the consequence of paying for it.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Now, for a lot of this data, the question of "how else would you be able to get it" becomes an interesting one. But not for your personal data.
It is a fact that some text lexems can be compiled to some useful executabe code. However some companies copyright those fact (they call it "source code").
It is a fact that some sequence of bytes can be interpreted by some players to show some movies. However, some of such facts are copyrighted and called "movies".
Now what's difference with other facts in databases? By the end of day - all data collections in databases are facts if can interpret them. Just for some interpretations we need a help of CPU or a compiler or a media player.
Of course I am not for copyrighting everything in databases - I am against copyrighting of anything.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: any idea is a fact discovered, not created. Therefore all patents and copyrights are obsolte. They are atificial instruments people use to squiz money from each other due to inefficient social model we are living here.
Less is more !
If this becomes law, how on earth are people expected to prove that facts were in fact stolen? It seems just about impossible.
Let's say I'm an employee of SCO. Now let's say SCO gets in the phone-number-lookup business and purchases a pre-existing phone database. I decide SCO is a bunch of litigious bastards and I quit in a huff. Just to piss them off, I look up phone numbers from a free source, or research them myself. Then I start my own phone-lookup-business.
It becomes insanely popular and takes market share away from SCO.
Now SCO decides that, as a former employee, I stole their database and am now causing them injury. This case is protected under this law. The problem is, how can SCO possibly prove that I stole information from them? By definition, our databases will contain the exact same information because these are facts. So it's all there for SCO: our databases are the same and I clearly had both incentive and the means to steal their database.
But I didn't. And now, most likely, the burden of proof is on me.
At this point, I am screwed.
And in this hypothetical example (doesn't sound so hypothetical, does it?), SCO has no right to own that database. If I pay for their number-lookup service, and they don't make me sign any terms of agreement, I should be able to search for every single number they have in their database and then form my own database. This law says I cannot because I do not have their authorization.
The law defines "Database" as:
"Subject to subparagraph (B), the term `database' means a collection of a large number of discrete items of information produced for the purpose of bringing such discrete items of information together in one place or through one source so that persons may access them.
That's right, libraries are databases. Imagine a private library full of public domain fiction. Now imagine I go in and copy every single book. I now open my own library. I can now be sued.
I realize this does not allow anyone to own facts, but this law is still wrong for similar reasons.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
By that reasoning could'nt I just go out and buy a set of encyclopedias and own all the info therein?
Initially, it seems like you can get sufficient protection for databases via "trade secret" protection. And this is probably true. But, this is true for any work. Copyright law could be abolished tomorrow and replaced with contract law. Next time you buy a book, rather than the "(c) 2004 XYZ Publishers", it could have a 1-page EULA in 4-point type that says you have the right to read it, but that's all, thank you very much. Part of the point of copyright law is that it replaces the need for an EULA.
Now, I'm not in favor of extending copyright protections to the contents of databases. I think the current rules allowing for copyright of the expression of the database are sufficient. But I wouldn't mind seeing something happen to the idea of the EULA, particularly for mass-market or "shrinkwrap" products. Specifically, I'd like to see a ruling that products may be covered by either an EULA _or_ copyright, but never both.
Custom databases or software are best suited to an EULA, where the buyer and seller have the interest and ability to negotiate a contract. Copyright law provides appropriate protection for "shrinkwrap" software, while still providing the end user with more rights than they would have if the seller dictated the terms of the contract.
In fact, I see no reason why databases can't be fairly used same as any other created work.
A database schema can already be copyrighted. The data itself cannot be copyrighted, unless it is itself already copyrightable (e.g., a database whose data is the text of novels and short stories).
Sports scores cannot be copyrighted, as they are available from many sources and as general knowledge (did you see the game last night...).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Everyone else has done a good job of arguing other flaws in your argument. Let me be the first (apparently) to point out that you *CANNOT* sit at an NBA game and retransmit or capture information about the game. They'll come after you if you do it via video. They'll come after you if you do it via audio signals. Put bluntly, if they thought your textual information feed was hurting ticket sales, they'd come after you for that.
Read the fine print on your next game ticket, watch the last few seconds of a TV broadcast, etc. All rights for retransmission are held by the NFL, the NBA, or whoever. Should profit motives be challenged, they'd aggressively work to close you down in an instant. Even for facts. For example, you can bet that, given this law, NFL.com or it's favorite licensee will use this as a way to silence all 'unlicensed' fantasy football sites unless fees are paid for using the statistics feed they provide. Indirect sources will be challenged with the goal being to silence anyone not paying fees.
The contract legalese on a game ticket already gives them your consent to that level of restriction.
The law is not reasonable unless I (and everyone else) can file claim on my information to prevent them from making millions off it's dissemination. For years, I've resented paying for an unlisted number... they should have to pay me for the data!
The law is not reasonable without grandfathering and retiring of rights. While we all know copyright is effectively forever, at least PRETEND to make nods in this direction.
The law is not reasonable unless it actively repeals aspects of DRM, guaranteeing that some or all legal protections will be lost if technical protections are resorted to. Require key escrow. Take steps to allow data recovery. Otherwise, future generations could be locked out of the information.
Intellectual property law is so incredibly broken, I don't feel charitable right now to grant anyone further rights here. This is more law on top of too many bad laws. For that reason alone, I'll fight it. Until we get concessions on DRM, copyright, patents, trademark, trade secret, etc. I'll fight anything in favor of more locks on information.
Incidentally, I work for one of these data-mining companies. They get paid by government agencies to put the data online (scant data entry costs: it comes on cd's and tapes), then charge again for access to the data. Now, we should give them perpetual, exclusive ownership of that public information?! Bah! Not without one HELL of a public interest reason. Profit is light-years away from a valid reason.
< rant off >
So if I write a sentence that says, "If you do this-and-this-and-this-and-this to a DVD, it will be decrypted", that's just a fact. But DeCSS was deemed illegal. So according to the US legal system, certain facts already can not only be owned, but made illegal to utter or to communicate.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
because if they consider the "interface" to the database to be, for example, a web site (e.g. msn.com) we are in deep shite.
for example, all search engines could be prone to being taken to court for (accidentally or deliberately, esp. if some daft company doesn't respect robots.txt) cacheing someone's site.
e.g. google is going to be in serious trouble.
I think what Mablung was trying to say was that Big database company, while they don't really much care for the individual data they collected, worried that other company will steal a LARGE bulk of their database, the database they have been constructed, organized, sorted and collected overtime. It's not the data themselves they're sweating over about, its the cost they spent constructing the database and they don't want other reaped the benefit of their hard work. As far as Lexis-Nexis is concerned, as long as they don't stop others from getting information from their source (the places they get the data to put into the database), I see no problem in that. It cause time and money to put those information together.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
The people that are screaming about the sky falling clearly cannot read, or choose not to, have no concept of how horrendously expensive it is to design, build and maintain large database collections, and have no concept of how many "collections of facts" are out there that are already protected because they take more tangible physical forms, are prohibitively expensive to copy, or impossible to access without signing tediously lengthy contracts, so people just buy access to them or go to a library that has purchased access to them.
By insisting that you should have no right to protect your particular system of organizing a collection, the detractors are, knowingly or not, pushing to destroy, hinder the creation of, or make the access to increasingly more difficult, a huge amount of useful products. This is a very good bill and it covers all the caveats people think it does not.
If only they would read and comprehend it this argument would be over.
Tomorrow I will unveil my new iCorq line of ergonomic rectal gas valves and scalable rectal gas venting license plans.
"Do you have any FACTS to back up your license?"
Even though the bill has requirements before violation can be shown, and has a list of permitted activities, I see it being used the same way as the DMCA, to bully people who can't afford defense lawyers and who don't fully understand the law into stopping what they're doing or into forking over money.
If I'm writing a book about something, and I expect to sell the book (so it isn't non-profit related), can it count as news reporting so I can use information from other people's databases? What is "news?"
What about databases that contain confidential information, like hospital records. I assume those are already and permanently protected from scrutiny without a warrant. What types of information are totally protected this way (like diagnosis), and what is the privacy cut-off (phone numbers are public unless you pay a fee)? I would say there's precedent for saying that people's information is private without a warrant, and the phone book is a violation of my privacy (though I agree to the company's terms by using their service).
Huh? This bill does not extend copyright protection to databases. It creates a new class of intellectual property designed to protect the 'sweat of the brow' that created the database. As the parent pointed out, Wired got it wrong too. The only thing this bill does is outlaw spidering a database. You can still create your own and/or use any non-copyrigted material in it.
1. Put a copyright on your name
2. Issue a public licence with a price on you
3. Collect license fees from everebody who is listing you, including your bank, your government, tax collector office, police, military and everybody who has you on his PIM.
4. Profit!
5. Sue everybody who won't pay
6. More profit!
Ooops, I missed the obligatory ???? point. Hmmm, maybe it's a working plan...
There you are, staring at me again.
Copyright is based on the copyright of expression, not collections of facts. Whether you like it or not a collection of facts is not a creative enough use in order to create a copyright. See Feist v. Rural Telephone, where it was ruled that the white pages listings were not copyrightable.
Also putting copyright into the realm of facts, whether that just be a 'collection' puts a chilling effect on the use of those facts even though they as a whole are only copyrighted. There is no explicit definitions of how much use of the facts contained within a database, another chilling factor.
Defintion from the bill of a database: the term `database' means a collection of a large number of discrete items of information produced for the purpose of bringing such discrete items of information together in one place or through one source so that persons may access them.
That sounds like a creative work . . . . umm no.
Interested in Sports with a brain? --> http://dispatchesofj.blogspot.com/
Copyright protects against copying, not against independent creation.
All your code are belong to us!!
The SCO Group announced today that they have a copyrighted database of all of the keywords and library function names from every popular programming language. CEO Dar-el indicated that they will file a lawsuit against a prominent standards organization within 48 hours.
But they better be prepared to prove that they produced their work without stealing it from my database.
It's still up to me to prove they're infringing.
So which is it?
Say I have a list of names , and another list of colours. If I make an association between the names and the colors, I have created something new, even if I didn't create the colors and I didn't create the names. You can now get a list of names that are associated with the color blue. That association is my creation. This new law would say that I own the association. It doesn't say that I own the names and colors.
And you think this is a GOOD thing?
Let's say that I take a list of cheeses and match them to either "sweet" "sour", or "salty". I create a database of these foods, which I now own.
Now let's say you want to create a list of foods and classify them as "sweet", "sour", or "salty".
Guess what! You can't include cheese, because I own that database.
What a nightmare!
Ok, but the article cites a 1997 Supreme Court decision which allowed Motorla to retransmit scores. What you and others fail to understand is that this law is essentially about stealing a database. It's not about copyrighting information. It is saying, in a nutshell, "you can't steal my database and sell it for profit". In the sponsor's own words: "The bill only applies where someone takes a substantial portion of the database and uses it in a way that causes commercial harm to the provider of the data. You have to prove an injury, and it needs to be significant".
As for database overlap, that wouldn't be a problem if this law were implemented. Separate creations of the same set of facts are still separate.
This could actually still be a problem. The question is "can he who creates a fact own that fact"? I'll use sports, since that directly affects a website I operate.
Let's say that the NBA decides the official scoring of all its basketball games. They are the sole creators of those facts.
Yet this law would also allow them to copyright those facts too, since it could claim the scoring is a database. Even if they published the facts in a book, they could call it a database. No one else could republish the official NBA scoring unless they only pulished a player or two.
And you can't compile these facts yourself, because by definition, only the NBA can compile them. You'll have to pony up $50k or so to the NBA to license them.
Is that a good thing?
Now what if you decide to use the local newspaper's microfilm to compile the sports scores from the previous year? Bzzzt. You'd be violating the property rights of the newspaper (or more likely the AP), which compiled those scores into a daily database.
Major sports are just itching to control their data. Both Baseball and Basketball have been involved in lawsuits involving data -- related to real-time broadcast, but this shows they want to control what they see as their "property".
What about stock quotes? Do you want to track and publish the results of your favorite stock somewhere? Bzzzt. You can't. You can't take them from the newspaper, nor can you even take them from the Dow's website. Both are protected databases. You would have to license such information.
How about this one -- let's say you want to list the courses offered by your local college. Bzzzt. You can't use their schedule to do this, because they own that database. You'd have to go to every class and ask the professor the name of the course, or you'd have to license the information.
While this bill may seem good on its face, the fact that there is no difference between a list of NBA scores from yesterday and a list of NBA scores from all time makes it a very dangerous piece of legislation.
Ralph Slate
http://www.hockeydb.com
I don't think they are saying you can "own the facts", you can own that particular structure of facts. (unless of course the facts are unique... Which something like phone numbers for example wouldn't apply, since that information is not unique).
Kind of like how you can trademark a design made of particular shapes and colors... You don't own a trademark on the shapes nor the colors on their own.
The bill is sponsored by three Republicans and two Democrats. Their names can be found at:
( +@ 1(H.R.+3261)++@1(H.+R.+3261)++)
. vote-smart.org/bio.php?can_id=H4340103a tive F. James Sensenbrenner, Republican Congressman from Wisconsin
m art.org/bio.php?can_id=BC040489
t e-smart.org/bio.php?can_id=MOH52826v e Michael R. Turner, Republican Congressman from Ohio
s mart.org/bio.php?can_id=H3021103
- smart.org/bio.php?can_id=BC042391
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?r108:@OR+
http://www.house.gov/sensenbrenner/
http://www
Represent
http://www.wexler.house.gov/
http://www.vote-s
Representative Robert Wexler, Democratic Congressman from Florida
http://www.house.gov/miketurner/
http://www.vo
Representati
http://www.house.gov/portman/
http://www.vote-
Robert J. Portman, Republican Congressman from Ohio
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/
http://www.vote
Representative William D. Delahunt, Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts
Bull!!!
If you can copyright a collection, you must
needs also be copyrighting or patenting or
trademarking its individual parts. It is a
principle of mathematics....soon to be
patented by micro$$$$$$$$..... that the whole is
the sum of its parts
So I looked at your website. Its pretty cool stuff. How much does one of these nodes sell for? I wasn't able to find a price.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Perhaps this is another case of technology making another business model obsolete.
Afterall, if this is public information in the database (and if it weren't then it would not be sellable to the public), then that information is out there. Now, the technology is ready and the infrastructure is rapidly becoming ready - how long before we just ask our computer to compile the data as needed.
A clever software agent could do the work for us.
Nobody would 'own' the data or the database, but some companies might run a compilation service. That is similar to the model we're talking about but not the same: would a rival compilation company go to another to get the data they wanted? Well they might if they were selling for more than the other company, but that's called sub-contracting.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Everyone is talking about matching colors to numbers, or Lexis Nexis.
/.'ers is wrong. The Supreme Court, and the appeals courts in the building code case has already stated that Lexis Nexis is protected by contract law and terms of service. They have further stated in the buildings code case that there is no loss of copyright benefits for the publisher of the building codes, as their version will be official, and all other aggregators will be unofficial versions. Which version will the building departments use? Official or unofficial? The courts? Official or unofficial? Libraries? Official or unofficial? Engineer schools, electrical colleges, electrical vocational schools, architectural programs? Official or unofficial?
The current situation with Lexis Nexis is already covered under contract law, terms of service, and other laws.
This proposed law has nothing to do with the way Lexis Nexis or the phone book currently operates.
This is about preventing the guy in Texas from publishing the building codes to his town, and other nearby towns on the internet.
Most building codes, fire codes, electrical codes, and other related codes are not easily available. Thanks to the copyrights by the publishers of the books, these laws are "incorporated by reference". The only way to find out what the law is in your locality is to buy the expensive book, or visit your building department and look at the codes/laws (while there, they don't lend them), or go to the county clerk, wait in line, then read the laws (they don't lend them). That's it. The localities publish in their official records changes to the adopted by reference codes, but they don't publish the complete codes.
So one guy in Texas decided to buy the codes, and publish everything on the internet. And was sued by the publisher. The publisher makes money by selling the codes for $70+ for the localities. And under very restricted circumstances, you can register to see very small portions of the laws, doled out bit by bit, on the website of the publisher. To do a decent search, to get reasonable amounts of info would take days or weeks.
The guy in Texas was sued, and the case has been winding all the way to the Supreme Court. I believe the guy won the last appeal, the publisher appealed to the Supreme Court, and the appeal was denied. That's as far as I remember.
The question here is not if you spend some time collecting a database, whether someone can steal your work. Lexis Nexis, the publisher who lost the building codes case, the publisher who controls the fire codes that is supporting the building codes publisher, and others would love for you to believe that.
The question here is whether you will be forced to pay to find out what the law is.
And for all the geniuses commenting on the "facts" and using the phone book as an example, you are currently able to buy, at a low cost, complete phone book listings from every publisher who controls the info, including Verizon. That means that you can buy the list from Verizon, and publish your own telephone book. This law passes, and that changes.
Every Lexis Nexis example cited by
The only ones using the unoffical versions will be the poor slobs like you and me, and the homeowners who wouldn't have purchased the code book to begin with anyway. The courts see that, and they thus spoke.
Just like the MPAA/RIAA are trying to rewrite the Sony/Betamax case, and taking away the fast forward buttons, and taking away the other fair use rights through broadcast flags and other digital restrictions management, so are Lexis Nexis, the building code publishers, the fire code publishers, and other deep pocket publishers trying to take away your rights to free access to the law, and free access to information.
The internet is all about a free printing press. And control, or de-control, of information. Most of your idiot posts on this topic are in favor of the publishers. The DMCA passed by keeping low and not getting anyone's attention. And by complacency. When you finally wake up to what has been lost with this bill, don't come cryin' home to mama.
ie - a multitude (millions and millions) of databses - each containing one and only one fact.
,imho, SCO type companies out there, I wouldn't put it past them to try this.
A database (collection of facts) does not have to be in any fancy container like any of the big DB vendors would use. A single flat ascii file could (and has been in the past) passed off as a database.
Make each simple file contain on "fact", then each time that fact is used, say "That's an exact dupe of my database" - produce the flat file contents to prove it - and voila - instant lawsuit.
It's not practical by any means, and highly improbable to maintain.
However with all the
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Not quite right. A _sequence_ of notes makes a song. An unordered collection of notes would not be a song. Your metaphor breaks down.
The Internet Archive has a copy of the whole internet for the last decade. Under this law, does this mean that they own the content or just that they own their copy of their database & thus people must pay to use their copy of the Internet. If so, we can proclaim that Archive.org owns a copy of the entire Internet.
Cool deal for the Wayback Machine
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Not quite right. A _sequence_ of notes makes a song. An unordered collection of notes would not be a song.
If you would read past the next sentence in my previous post, you would see that was my point exactly. A database doesn't have to be in any particular order, where as a sequence of notes does have to be in a particular order to make a song.
Yeah, I am always simpathetic when a huge oligopolistic player demands for stricter laws protecting his business against hypothetical potential threats, making us believe that he will go out of business without such laws... I am eagerly awaiting for Walmart to suing competing small grocery stores for copying its prices... or something. What are other monopolies that haven't tried to create laws to protect its monopolistic position? Are there any?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The creative act of assembling a database -- and if you don't think it's creative, you've never done it, it takes a TREMENDOUS effort to assemble and maintain a useful data relation even if you're using publically accessible information -- is something that should be protected.
I've done it and, sorry, it's not creative. The technologies you use for compiling huge databases may be creative, but that doesn't mean the act of assembling the database itself is creative. It may require an effort, but it isn't like the companies working in this field need any additional protections. They seem to be doing quite well. If anything, they are too inefficient and greedy to be let alone - the competition from other firms reusing the data will be beneficial to the society/economy.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
actually, there's an interesting example of this idea in current use.
Several convicts have copyrighted their names and then sued the judges and prosecutors for not paying a ludicrous license fee (of $500,000 or more) per use of the name in court papers. Although it has no chance of surviving a court battle, they can use it to place liens on the judges and prosecutors until the case is resolved - and the lien goes on the person's credit history, causing them to be denied loans, mortgages, etc.
I would argue that it is, in fact, the facts that are being copyrighted (despite the claims and arguments). Why do I think this? Because the companies aren't worried about somebody else getting an exact replica of their database, they're worried about somebody else getting the same *information* as them and becoming a competitor. Also, allowing the copyright of a database *is* allowing copyright of a fact. That Joan lives on Mockingbird Lane is a fact and that she is the wife of John is both a relationship and a fact. Databases are merely aggregations of these kinds of facts and relationships. By copyrighting a database that shows Joan and John are married, they are copyrighting the relationship, the fact; and they would be able to sue anybody else that tried to present the same relationship/fact (especially if the defendant had ever been a customer of the company).
I assume you meant "had come up with it". Most music that sounds good to humans obeys certain rules, and by following those rules anybody *can* come up with identical pieces of music. It's just whoever finds a particular combination first that gets the copyright.
Geez... RTFA
Yes, I can make my own cheese database, and use whatever data I want.
I just can't copy your database and claim it, or sell it, as mine.
Now, explain again how this is bad.
There are companies dedicated to producing maps, and they are copyrighted, even tough the streets are "facts". I don't think anybody can say this is a bad thing.
So, explain to me how this is different from producing complex databases of facts. Then start screaming about the sky falling.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an Action Alert on this. U.S. Citizens can go there and send e-mails, faxes, and letters to their respective congresspersons.
All it takes is a few minutes. Do it, Do it NOW! While its still legal to report the fact that this bill exists.
OK, I admit, I was wrong in my interpretation. I still think this is bad because it causes people to gather the same facts repeatedly; no one can use someone else's "database"
I think it's a problem that the legislation fails to define words like "large" and "substantial", when defining a database. Is 100 records "large"? Is a thousand? Is a million? If I copy 1000 records from a million-record database, is that "substantial copying"? Is having a multi-million dollar computer system to compute stock quotes "substantial expense", meaning that all stock quotes are copyrighted?
News-reporting exception aside, this still would put too much power into the hands of "fact creators", especially in the world of sports, but also in many other areas.
For example, the NBA would "own" its player statistics, because technically speaking, it compiled them into a database. No one else could use them without either licensing, or being at the game and keeping score themselves (which wouldn't be official anyway). You might be able to report them, but you couldn't create an almanc with them in it.
The airlines could own a list of routes that they travel. You couldn't use the airline's site to compile your own list, because you would be using their database.
The Dow would own stock quotes. You couldn't use any source to compile your own analysis history because it all originated in the Dow's database.
The TV networks would own their TV schedules. Any list they released would be protected under this law.
A college would own a list of courses that it offered. Unless you were willing to monitor every room occupied during a semester, or unless you were willing to interview a ton of students to find out what they were taking, you wouldn't be able to compile your own list.
This law is too broad, and doesn't address a pain that this country is suffering. There isn't a dearth of databases out there that are being hacked and freely distributed.
This bill is about corporate America wanting to create a new tangible piece of IP: facts.
As usual, the reason most people are getting upset is because this seems so difficult to limit. I couldn't agree more. For example:
What is a database? What are we talking about here? A list of facts? A list of associations? A tree of definitions? Well how do you define it precisely for the purposes of legislation? What is database structure? Is it the entries or just the shape?
What is a "significant portion" of a database? What if Alice lists all the health benefits of coffee and Bob reports them all? What if Candice compiles a list of restaurants and David provides links to all the vegan ones? What if Ella has a database of 3000 entries? How many would Frank have to steal to be breaking the law? What if it was a 3 entries database?
What are the criteria for economic loss due to the database being copied in part? What is significant economic disadvantage? Example: Yahoo reports on the sports score and NBA claims... what? That people might have visited their website and saw their ads?
And then there's a bit in there saying that "reasonable" use is OK. Well, we don't really have any precedent for "reasonable" use of databases and so again this should really be defined. Is it "reasonable" for me to copy out a large chunk of my organization's email list and distribute it? What if I removed all the pretty pictures and formatting and went to a simple text document? I was making things easier for myself, I could claim. You ruined all our hard work and undermined our corporate image, they would reply.
So I fear this bill, even though I am in a different country (the Internet makes national borders disappear under certain circumstances) because it doesn't tell me exactly what I can get away with, and will probably be quite unevenly applied until a few precedents are created. And then... well it could be OK, or it could be horrible. It just depends on the judges in question.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
I agree it might lead to abuse. Then again, having designed and mantained databases myself, I know that gathering facts is not trivial. Unless you think Lexis-Nexis should be free for all, you'll agree this work deserves some protection. ;)
I think what you are mentioning is a "slippery slope" fallacy. We don't know that any of that would happen, and have no reason to believe it. Then again, I pawned my tinfoil hat some time ago, so I might be a bit off the Slashdot view in these issues
I think it may need some protection; believe me, I have spend YEARS and tens of thousands of dollars gathering and organizing the data that I make available online for free (I get ad revenue). I realize that someone could theoretically come in and hammer away at my server, downloading it all in one fell swoop, and then set up a site directly competing with mine in 10 minutes.
However, I also believe that the laws related to unfair business practices would be in my favor. I can't prove that, but I believe it based on what I understand about these kinds of laws.
I don't think that I should be given a sword that I can wield against anyone who uses any amount of data from my database -- in fact, I know data gets used all the time all over the world (I have ways of knowing if the data is from my site or not). And I don't mind, because none of this usage is directly competing with my site, and if the usage is done right, it can even enhance the public's awareness of my site.
But the simple fact of the matter is that I recognize that I was able to build the data in my database because someone else, perhaps even 50 years ago, decided to compile this data into a book or almanac. I can now use the data from that book to enhance and add value to it, and the public benefits (as do I).
Plus, I generally respect the work done by others; when gathering data, I respect competing organizations by not using them as a primary source, I use the official sources of data. But the conflict comes in when the official source can also own the data for profit. At that point the data is locked away for good, ala Disney's copyrights.
Ralph
You don't know wha the fuck you're talking about. Read Feist, moron.