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."

Comments

Average

[James McGuigan]

Its a rather average ruling

Re:Average

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be mean.

Re:Average

[interkin3tic]

It's pretty normal for slashdot.

Re:Average

[Maxo-Texas]

I hate it when you guys are in this mode.

Re:Average

[davester666]

Slashdot, don't ever deviate from what you do best.

Bad news for Wolfram alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bad news for Wolfram alpha

[Opportunist]

They can claim all they want. Law trumps contract.

Re:Bad news for Wolfram alpha

[pavon]

I just did some queries and the only copyright statement I see is the standard one at the bottom of their page. They do have a legitimate copyright on their pages, including the layout, design and the content which they created. That notice doesn't necissarily imply that they claim to own the facts that are being displayed. In fact, they frequently provide citations for those facts, which implies that they don't claim to own them.

Re:Bad news for Wolfram alpha

[fustakrakich]

Money trumps law

Between companies, there is a differnt law.

[houghi]

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.

In light of this ruling

[kjshark]

I withdraw my application to copyright arithmetic.

Map Data is open, the tiles are just math.

[Anonymous Coward]

I should be able to rip all of the map tiles I want, it's just math on public data.

Judgment shouldn't matter

[pruss]

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.

Re:Judgment shouldn't matter

[NoOneInParticular]

I think you've got a fair point. In this view, I would say that many accounting reports of the last few decades should be considered creative in nature and therefore copyrightable. It seems the banks agree.

Judge Karas uses modern physics as an analogy

[mpoulton]

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.