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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.)
at LISNews (kind of the /. for librarians...)
Can I demand an immunity deal as a condition of testifying at all?
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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 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 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.
... 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...
Actually I'd call this more fascism. Where the corporations run the government.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
...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.
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.
... and yes, I am aware of the irony regarding the usage of the U.S. Army's slogan (An Army of One!).
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?
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.
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
Except that this law does not propose to protect facts and this law is not a "copyright". What it prevents is using only someone else's database to make a derivative database rather than collecting the facts from source materials independently.
Personally I don't agree with any law that uses the force of government to interfere with how I use my physical property in favor of someone else's "intellectual property rights", so of course I oppose this law. But when taking the existing copyright laws as assumptions, I see this law as a perfectly logical conclusion.
I do not have a signature
I read the bill, and I'm in the news business, and I think it's very bad. The government does not belong in a role of defining what is, and what is not, a legitimate news organization. The freedom of speech and of the press belongs to all the people, not just to a select few, or to specific corporate entities.
And how, exactly, is this different from how things are right now?
Go surf to Yahoo! Sports, scroll to the bottom, click on "Terms of Service". Now go read through section 6. If you're lazy (this is
Oh hell. You are lazy. Here it is:
You're already prohibited from slurping from Yahoo!'s NBA page, or any other page from Yahoo! for that matter. Section 10 is even more clear about this. It's short too. Sure, people may do it, but that doesn't make it legal.
Contract and copyright law already covers what needs to be covered here. This is just another law that overextends existing protections, all to the benefit of a few and the harm of the many.
> 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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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.