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Australian Judge Rules Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted
nfarrell writes "Last week, an Australian Judge ruled that copyright laws do not apply to collections of facts, regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them. In this case, the case surrounded the reproduction of entries from the White and Yellow Pages, but the ruling referred to a previous case involving IceTV, which republishes TV guides. Does this mean that other databases of facts, such as financial data, are also legally able to be copied and redistributed?" Here are analyses from a former legal adviser to the directory publisher which prevailed as the defendant in this case, and from Smart Company.
... facts interspersed with opinions? Is there partial copyright in effect with only the opinion parts falling under copyright law?
Funnily enough, it would seem that eliminating information can make something copyrightable. The elimination process takes creativity (you have to choose what to leave out), so presumably if I publish a creative 2D representation, or only a carefully selected subset of the phonebook, I can claim copyright??
For example ... Lexis-Nexus? And big chemical databases (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_database) like the Beilstein database (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilstein_database)?
On the one hand I'm very glad that mere facts aren't patentable, but on the other hand if this means that anyone can slurp down your entire database and then resell it or even export it then it's less of a boon. This is why e.g. the EU came up with their "database directive" which expressly provides databases with copyright protection if they are "collections of facts that took significant effort to compile".
Not that that's ideal, because it e.g. lets public transport providers claim copyright on timetables (which they promptly abused in the EU until court-cases established that public transport providers had to draw uptime-tables anyway in order to make their networks run, and that it required negligible effort to put that stuff into a database afterwards). Likewise with ZIP codes in the EU: it may seem ridiculous but ZIP code databases are copyrighted there.
So what is the legal status of databases here? Does anyone know?
In Germany and other EU countries there is special wording in the Author's Right (Urheberrecht) to protect databases even if the single entry in the database is not protected. So while in Germany facts are not protected by the Author's Right, databases of facts are.
Interestingly though since the addition of databases to the Author's Right in the 90ies the market share of EU based companies for databases has dwindled. This is probably pure coincidence.
I disagree. The fact that the Washington monument 555 feet and 5 1/8 inches tall is not copyrightable but a 3-D model may be. The model must have some form of coordinate system. It must have some sort or relationship between the coordinates. It must have some indication of what is solid and what is not. This is much more than simple facts.
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings. Think of how much it would cost to 3D model New York City.
Here's another example.
In the petroleum industry, companies use expensive instruments lowered down a well to take all sorts of readings of the physical properties of the surrounding rocks. The raw numbers (i.e. the measurements) are copyrighted by the company that collected the data, as are the original paper plots of the values (a particular presentation). The companies that record this stuff charge hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, much of the well data must be released publicly after a period of time, and even though copyright is still retained by the collector of the data, the public release gives you new options. If you sit down and digitize the paper plots to generate your own numbers from them (i.e. deriving an approximation of the values on the graphical plot), you have merely copied the "facts", and you aren't infringing. There is a whole industry based on this principle.
There is no standardized format for 3D models. Sure there are some oft-used formats for transport between different applications, but in those, even the fact that the model is built up out of verteces and triangles is somewhat of an artistic choice -- the modeller could have chosen NURBs. And even after that choice, the way in which he decides to distribute the polygons or NURBs can be wholly different from another modeller. As such there doesn't exist any way to build an exact 3D model of anything.
Any model built after an existing landmark will be some kind of rendition of that landmark. I think the rendition is the bit that would be copyrightable -- it's just as much not a pure representation of bare facts as a photograph would be. I'd say even if you make a laserscan of the object, this still somehow applies.
"There is no standardized format for 3D models."
Yes there is - it's called 'drafting.' Maybe there is no standardized format for computer representations, but EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM relies upon the same basic principles that originated from paper and pencil drafting/architectural design.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Because judges have been dealing with that kind of sophistry since at least the time of the Sophists, and they're not going to buy it.
A score of a public-domain piece of music indeed isn't independently copyrightable unless it were scored in some creative fashion.
(I'm talking here about 3d models of things that are themselves in the public domain; a 3d model of a sculpture where the sculpture itself is still under copyright would not be public domain.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So he's right - there are several standards.
No, he did not say there is "no single standardized format" he said there is "no standardized format."
There is nothing about standardization the requires there be only a single standard. An example of multiple standards is screw-heads where there are at least all of these different standards: phillips, slotted, pozidriv, square, robertson-square, hex, torx, tri-wing, torq-set, spanner-head, triple-square, polydrive, one-way, spline-drive, double-hex and bristol.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Human DNA has been patented: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/22064243.html But DNA is hardly anything else as just a "collection of facts". Do you mean that these patents were illicit?