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Copyright Ruling On Publishing Calculated Results: Common Sense Breaks Out
bfwebster writes "During the past few years, I served as an IT expert witness in BanxCorp v. Costco et al., in which BanxCorp sued Costco and Capital One for citing (with credit) its web-published national averages for CD and money market rates in their advertising. Judge Kenneth M. Karas issued his summary judgment opinion last fall, finding that BanxCorp's published averages are 'uncopyrightable facts' due to the simple calculation involved and the lack of ongoing human judgment in what banks were involved. Here is my summary of his findings, along with a link to the actual ruling."
Its a rather average ruling
the coin of the realm is kaput. now they must force each other to capitulate? what a spiritless scam. motive always equals results guaranteed
Wolfram alpha claims most notably claims copyright for all it's results, even when it is a simple mathematical calculation, or simple english to metric conversion.
Don't worry, bankers will just rewrite the laws to make an illegal method legal.
why would he lie? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOw1Spswb58
Here is a direct link to the opinion which does not go through bfwebster's blog:
http://www.schoeman.com/newsandevents/documents/NancyMertzel-130-OpinionandOrderRedacted.pdf
Namely of trying to use copyright to bury inconvenient facts.
If that would have stood, it would have been trivial to squelch reporting you don't want to happen. Just report it first, then take it out of circulation before it can hit the internet. Afterwards, anyone who tries to tell the world how you fucked up would have been open to a lawsuit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is between companies, so the laws are differently, or at least interpreted differently.
Now try that with a company on one side and an individual on the other side. Now switch sides.
Logic would say that there would be no differnce. The reality would be differnt.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I withdraw my application to copyright arithmetic.
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
They should have patented "A method for determining bank rates over a diverse set of banks" and sued in Texas.
I should be able to rip all of the map tiles I want, it's just math on public data.
He was directly involved in the case, and his blog makes interesting reading regarding the case. What is the purpose of circumventing it?
If "human judgement" needs to be involved in creating copyrightable info, then anything created at a bank is disqualified.
I'm a bit concerned by the implicit suggestion that if a lot of individual judgment went into producing the averages, then perhaps they might be copyrightable. IANAL, but it's my understanding that ideas, facts, opinions and judgments are not copyrightable. Only their expressions are, and only when there is creativity in the expression of the idea, fact, opinion or judgment. Whether there was creativity in coming up with the idea, fact, opinion or judgment should be completely irrelevant. Thus, when the judgment is that some number is 3.95%, then an expression of that judgment as "3.95%" is not copyrightable, being quite uncreative, but expressing it as "just a shade under four tenths of a tenth, where a shade is a twentieth of a tenth of a tenth" might be creative enough to be copyrightable.
It may, though, be that the judge is just doing a two-prong attack here: neither is the expression creative nor are the ideas creative either.
From Judge Karas' opinion: "Thus, the output data generated by using Newton’s Second Law of Motion — force equals mass times acceleration, or “F=ma” — would be a series of uncopyrightable facts, even though the output is in some sense an estimation because Newton’s formula fails does not consider relativistic effects."
No wonder he made the right decision on this case.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I don't know who they are but I would think BanxCorp would be happy to be mentioned favorably by Costco and Capital One.
In response to the phrase "common sense breaks out," I want to point out that "common sense" is often quite wrong.
The reason the scientific method is so rigorous is because we cannot rely on common sense to answer important questions. Often, a correct answer is very unintuitive and requires understanding of many non-obvious-but-relevant facts as well as a lot of deep thinking.
Common sense is fine when dealing with very simple problems in a very familiar environment, with relatively low impact. It is completely inappropriate to rely on it when dealing with hugely-impactful and multi-faceted issues like law (or science, or the proper application of moral values to complicated situations, etc.).