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.)

Comments

Re:Absolutely ridiculous

[Aneurysm9]

No, actually, under current law you are entirely within your right (absent additional contractual obligations) to copy verbatim an existing database. The "sweat of the brow" doctrine to which you seem to refer was flatly rejected by the Supreme Court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Phone books and other collections of facts are not copyrightable because "originality is a constitutional requirement" and collections of fact do not possess the requisite originality. Certain presentations of collections of facts may be eligible for copyright protection, but the underlying facts are still in the public domain.

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.

Re:Prior law might defeat this in court

[afidel]

Actually the most relevant case is Feist vs Rural Telecom. There the supremes used two branches of logic to overturn the lower courts rulings that the white and yellow pages of Rural were protected by copyright:

"Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works. Pp. 344-351

And

The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341] A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 101 (emphasis added). Thus, the statute envisions that some ways of selecting, coordinating, and arranging data are not sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection. Even a compilation that is copyrightable receives only limited protection, for the copyright does not extend to facts contained in the compilation. 103(b). Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas. Pp. 351-361.

The first point (and to me the more important one since it is based on constitutional law) still stands. However the second one is basically eliminated since Congress is amending the copyright law to include sets of facts.

The real point

[rwiedower]

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.