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Portions of SCO's Expert Reports Stricken
rm69990 writes "A day after Judge Dale Kimball reaffirmed Judge Wells' order tossing most of SCO's case, Judge Wells has stricken large portions of SCO's expert reports, stating that SCO was trying to do an end-run around IBM. As IBM put it in its motion papers, SCO will not be allowed to 'litigate by ambush.' This motion was regarding SCO's expert reports, where SCO attempted to insert new evidence after discovery had ended via their expert reports. Wells' ruled directly from the bench, and finished by telling SCO to 'take it up with Judge Kimball' if they had a problem. This really hasn't been a good week for SCO."
This is actually a very well known theory of copyright. An example: One cannot copyright factual data, but if one takes the factual data and arranges them in a novel enough way as to satisfy the "originality" requirement of copyright law, then that "author" can have a copyright over the selection and arrangement of the factual data. The data itself is not protected(anyone can put the same data in his own work), but that particular selection and way of arranging it is protected.
The copyright will normally be a "thin" copyright, meaning that for someone to be infringing he or she must have produced something nearly identical to whatever is protected. The data does not have to be factual data. A compilation of classical music now in the public domain is an example of something that might also be protected. This avenue is often used to try to protect computer databases where one entity has gone through a lot of trouble to collect a bunch of data and arrange it in a computer database, and someone else comes along and just copies it all.
Courts have held that things like the white pages (and in many cases the yellow pages) do not have sufficient originality to qualify for a compilation copyright.
In my opinion compilation and similar "data arrangement" copyrights are not a very good way to protect data (one reason is that you're attempting to protect "sweat of the brow" work through copyright, which is an idea that was rejected long ago).I feel that works of this type are better protected through tort law under the "unfair business practices" doctrine.