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Who Owns The Database?
dkm writes "The Boston Globe has an interesting article on legislation in Congress to make databases copyrightable. " Copyright issues are so nice and stickey; but at least it's not patents. Yet.
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I see us, as a society, heading for a situation where every facet of our lives will be dominated by intellectual property law. Want to think about "physics"? Sorry ma'am, we own that word. You'll have to pay us $5 every time you use it.
The problem our society is facing is that information has gotten radically easier to reproduce. It use to be that if you wanted to reproduce a "database" (then usually in book form) you would have to go to great effort and expense to typeset it, then print it, then distribute it.
None of these could be done casually, and it simply wasn't possible to easily undercut the original publishers. The problem is that computer technology has changed that. I can duplicate your whole database, world-wide, in a matter of minutes.
So what is the solution? Not more laws!!! I think that, ultimately, we are going to have to accept that IP is an obsolete concept -- indefensible in an electronic world. Everything is going to have to become open source. Emergency rooms need a database of antidotes? Great. Then they can pay someone to compile one on a contract basis.
You didn't contribute to the list this year? Sorry, you don't get access to it. I seriously doubt that, if the emergency rooms had to directly subsidze the creation of the list, they would be very eager to give it out to their stingy colleagues (especially in an industry as competitive as medicine). In the end, social pressures would encourage payment.
Let's not forget classical research either!!! The publication of open source databases is something that the Universities could do very effectively and would fit well with their classical role.
Bottom line... We don't need laws. We need a more enlightened attitude. Maybe it's time to campaign for the total abolition of IP law, worldwide. Otherwise, we will soon find that we have given soulless corporations the most basic of freedoms: freedom of information.
-- Slashdot sucks.
While there has been some debate with scientific data (rather useless outside specialist fields), the case of commercial data is less obvious. There have been a few historical cases which have given people pause about the monopolisation of data. One specific example was the privatisation of some early LandSat satellite imagery which according to one viewpoint, was immediately priced to the legislated maximum which effectively stunted academic research into algorithms for processing satellite imagery and any follow-on applications. Other raw data by definition can only have value if shared, e.g. is meterological data spread across multiple countries. With the increasing automatic data collection and computerisation, the potential of conflict for owners and users of databases will only increase.
One of the biggest issues is how to "price" the assembly and aggregation of disparate data. Even pure scientific data could have some commercial value (e.g. genetic codes) under the right circumstances. One solution may be to provide the raw data and the processed value-added stuff and let the market judge whether it is cheaper to massage the raw themselves or save time in purchasing the processed.
Another approach is to create data rights limited by geographical, time, or functional scope. However, this in turn raises more problems in debating to what extent data can be altered before it is considered a unique "new" work (compare with music mixes or composition of existing recognisable art scenes). How far down the value chain is one allowed to claim a slice of the action (compare music score composers claiming a slice of movie soundtracks of their songs)? These are still unanswered questions.
A collection of innoculous facts (e.g. mouse-clicks) can be transformed into a perpetual watch on your web-browsing habits. Given enough time and persistance, any digital event can be tied to a personal profile. Who "owns" this data? A satellite can take pictures of people sun-bathing, some countries would be paranoid to define this as invasion of their sovereign air-space.
In short, the information age will create a whole new raft of problems which will require some legistlation just to clarify any ambiguities. IMHO some time limits would be the most likely solution, even sensitive federal data can be declassified after a suitable cool-down period. But unfortunately I suspect that until some people have seen how far the system can be abused, I doubt whether there will be any popular outcry for safeguards.
LL
I don't see why a Linux distribution wouldn't be considered a database. This could, indeed, have some nasty implications unless the law is written very narrowly (which would surprise me).
The big question here is how the copyright on the database relates to the copyright of an individual entry within the database. If the two are legally independent, then even if all the packages are covered by the GPL, a given distribution may be proprietary, requiring a separate license for each installation.
Legal? Yes, under current law.
BS. This is no more legal than would be doing the same thing with Steven King's latest horror epic. At least they let us know up front what the factual content of the rest of the article is liable to be.
Why would anyone spend $2 million to create a database if it's not going to be protected?'' said David Mirchin, of SilverPlatter Information, a database publisher in Norton, Mass.
Gee, I don't know. Why do they do it now? The fact is, databases are protected. Taking a database someone else has compiled and republishing it is a violation of law. The courts have ruled on this several times as specifically regards the internet in the last several years. However, the information in the database is not necessarily protected. If said info is otherwise publically available, then you cannot prevent others from using it.
What you see here is a push (not a new one; it's been going on for a while) to allow someone to create a database of freely available information, and make that information proprietary. The rationale behind this has been that it's the only way to ensure that the information hasn't been 'stolen' from the database, rather than gathered independently. Of course, it's not hard to see what the real motivation is; it's becoming very easy to gather large collections of freely available information. Many people see this as an opportunity to grab a free ride and make a lot of money.
I'm sure most everyone here can see the obvious problem with allowing the proprietization of this information. If you obtain it independently, how are you going to prove it? And if you create an independent database? Yes, you can document your sources, but unless you can afford to defend yourself in court, this information will be effectively off limits to you unless you pay whoever has bothered to gather it into one spot.
I keep hearing so much about how Americans are doing so well, how strong our economy is, how much everybody has. Why then, is greed becoming the defining trait of our culture? Are not Bill Gates' tens of billions enough? I kid you not, we as a culture and as a country are headed down a very ugly road; should we persist, we most certainly will get what we deserve.