Newspaper Articles Not Copyrightable In Slovakia 86
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)."
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
There is plenty of creativity in journalism. In the US, journos exhibit creativity when they try to create two sides out of a one sided issue, conjures up non existent reasons for an illegal war [fair.org], or print outright works of fiction as fact [wikipedia.org].
Finally a test case (Score:5, Interesting)
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.