Who Owns The Facts? 490
windowpain writes "With all of the furor over the Patriot Act a truly scary bill that expands the rights of corporations at the expense of individuals was quietly introduced into congress in October. In Feist v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. the Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted. But H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act neatly sidesteps the copyright question and allows treble damages to be levied against anyone who uses information that's in a database that a corporation asserts it owns. This is an issue that crosses the political spectrum. Left-leaning organizations like the American Library Association oppose the bill and so do arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who wrote an impassioned column exposing the bill for what it is the week after it was introduced."
What's onerous? (Score:2, Informative)
(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--
(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;
(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and
(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.
(b) INJURY- For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue.
(c) TIME SENSITIVE- In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved.
Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) PROTECTION NOT EXTENDED- Subject to paragraph (2), protection under section 3 shall not extend to computer programs, including any computer program used in the manufacture, production, operation, or maintenance of a database, or to any element of a computer program necessary to its operation.
Loophole (Score:2, Informative)
PHP db hook and you're home free
I don't see what's wrong here (Score:5, Informative)
A few quick notes:
I won't annoy all of you by requote the whole text of the bill (which I highly recommend you read before flaming). However, from my reading of it, all it seems to prohibit is for someone to make available significant amounts of a commercial database for their own profit. Basically, you can't spider Lexis-Nexis or the like and sell the info, but you CAN independently collect that data from direct sources and compete with them.
If I'm missing something here, PLEASE tell me. Again, read the bill first though, before you spew fire.
From Permitted Acts (Score:2, Informative)
So presenting the data via a reference to the original data is still allowed.
Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:5, Informative)
C code is no more a set of facts than poetry is a set of facts. C does more than generate hashes, for one thing (at least the Linux code does more than that, else there'd be a lot of coders who've wasted a lot of time). Code is a set of instructions, which are together part of a process. It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book. A collection of, say, reserved names in Java may be merely a collection of facts; an original creation is not. It's also inventive, in the patentable sense (`look-and-feel' patents, of course, raise some big controversy). But it's not simply a collection of facts.
Re:Significant damages (Score:3, Informative)
Check the dictionary sometime, treble is a synonym for triple. Also, look at the law-specific lingo [cornell.edu].
Treble IS triple! HAH! (Score:3, Informative)
1. Triple: "treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day" (George Eliot).
2. Music. Relating to or having the highest part, voice, or range.
3. High-pitched; shrill.
Good god boy, one would almost think you ain't never been fishing! (If you actually haven't...well, I truly pity you. But anyway, a triple-hooked fishook is called a "treble hook".)
Sports... (Score:1, Informative)
They couldn't copyright facts, but printed it in a certain format, and copyright that, and "force/encourage/whatever" people to use that format and pay the fee, or face legal action.
Media outlets go along with the plan, and everyone else of course backs down in the face of the threat of legal action.
Re:fuckedcompany? no.. fuckedrepublic (Score:4, Informative)
The sneak and peak search provision of the Patriot Act is widely regarded as one of its most detestable parts and will be the first thing called in to question if Congress ever gets around to revisiting the Patriot Act, something I doubt they will find the backbone to do anytime soon.
Did you actually read the link in my post to the University of Georgia. I'll quote since you must not have read it before you started ranting:
Section 213 of the USA Patriot Act not only specifically grants the federal judiciary power to issue sneak and peek warrants, but also, by allowing their use for every federal crime and by placing no meaningful limits on their issuance, encourages their issuance. It may be expected that as time passes the use of such warrants will become the rule rather than the exception in federal court, and that when a conventional search warrant is issued it will almost always have been preceded by a sneak and peek warrant.
Nearly two decades ago a prescient federal judge, in a dissenting opinion, warned that sneak and peek search warrants "constitute
Been There, Done That, Must Fight (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think many of the comments truly understand just how much information is on a typical web site, both on the page and in the server, that would be subject to a reversal of FEIST.
In our case, to give an idea, we presented a "how to" for homeowners on repairing common appliances and when to call the professionals.
Consider this...there are only so many ways that you can say: "Replace the worn part."
That's what we were threatened over; C&D letters and responses flying around, and out of the midst of this, researching for an attorney on our side, I ran across FEIST and Shepardized it out.
We ran with it, pointing out the case, reinforcing the decision, and having the weight of a unanimous Supreme Court decision behind it.
We won. The other guys backed down. We passed the word to a few other web sites being similarly threatened, and the attornies ran like vampires in sunlight.
But this _simple_ of an example, where a common and expected phrase becomes part of a "database", shows how HR 3261 can be applied to us all if it should pass.
This bill needs to be stopped...not just for the threat to the internet, but to basic research, to common students trying to do term papers, to authors trying to write, to even repeating breaking news from a web site or the TV.
Re:When I remember Poland... (Score:2, Informative)
You made this up yourself? The only ones who don't pay taxes in Sweden are students (if you don't count the 25% VAT).
the bottom bracket pays 0%, and the upper bracket, which begins at 10% above the mean wage earned amounts to a tax of 57%
Totaly wrong. Just isnt so.
with ultra-low unemployment,
Yeah, only like 7-8% or so.
inflation,
OK, you had a lucky guess....
national debt,
but just one
I don't hate the country I live in... but trust me, it ain't heaven. A lot of your "facts" was true during the 70'-80'. High standards and low unemployment was kept by huge national debt. and many people where employed by the goverment. This ended with a minor krash in the begining of the 90'. Now it's more or less like any othe country in the EU.
Get your facts straight... (Score:4, Informative)
Living here is good, that is true, but it is not the utopia you make it out to be.
You are describing Sweden in the 70's, not in the 00's. (Being completely intact after WWII gave us a good head start...)
After a slight crisis in the 90's national debt is up, unemployment is up a bit, and we are over all more on par with other western european countries.
Re:Question.... (Score:2, Informative)
In Europe there are few cases ongoing, where a company Fixtures Marketing (who decides when and where the football (soccer) games are played) wants money from gambling comapnies because they are using the publicly available information about the games.
The Hogsta Domstolen seeks a preliminary ruling on the following questions:
1. In assessing whether a database is the result of a "substantial investment" within the meaning of Article 7(1) of Council Directive 96/9/EC of 11 march 1996 on the legal protection of databases (the "database directive") can the maker of a database be credited with an investment primarily intended to create something which is independent of the database and which thus does not merely concern the "obtaining, verification or presentation" of the contents of the database? If so, does it make any difference if the investment or part of it nevertheless constitutes a prerequisite for the database?
AB Svenska Spel contends in this case that Fixtures Marketing Limited's investment is primarily concerned with the drawing up of the fixture lists for the English and Scottish football leagues and not with the databases where the data are stored. Fixtures marketing Limited, for its part, argues that it is not possible to distinguish the work for the purpose of planning the game and that the purpose of drawing up the fixture lists.
The rest of the story... [patent.gov.uk]
Re:More "IP" landgrabbing... (Score:3, Informative)