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Newspaper Articles Not Copyrightable In Slovakia
Yenya writes "In Slovakia, newspaper articles can be freely aggregated and archived, and are not worth copyright protection. The district court in Bratislava, Slovakia, stated in the case between news publishing house Ecopress and a news monitoring company Storin, that while the news articles manifests traces of creativity, it is not enough to be considered worth protecting the authors rights (English translation)."
The copyright lobby is still trying to locate us on the map. Once they find us, our politicians will last maybe 3 minutes...
You sure? These comments are original works of me, my opinion, my creation.
You have to see the difference between information and creation. That Hydrogen is the lightest element in the periodic table is not copyrightable. It's information. Even if I create an elaborate statement that culminates in its essence in this and little else, there's no chance that I'll retain copyright of it. Because the main part of what I created is still just the information that hydrogen is the element with the least mass.
A fantasy story about various atoms coming together and having a party, while playing puns on their weight and some of their properties (and look how fat uranium looks, any more yellow cake and she's gonna blow!) is a different matter. That IS copyrightable.
Does this mean I can't use the quote button?
You seem confused. The copyright of facts and the copyright of newspaper articles are two distinct things.
That may indeed be true in the US, where "facts" and "newspaper articles" definitely are two distinct things most of the time.
Will this cause the total collapse of the Slovakian news business? My suspicion is "no".
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens, so finally there might be some (slightly) more objective evidence for those of us who are interested in how the current copyright laws encourage or discourage various economic endeavors.