Posted on 09/06/2003 10:45:31 AM PDT by HAL9000
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are circulating a proposed bill that would prevent wholesale copying of school guides, news archives and other databases that do not enjoy copyright protection.The proposed bill would provide a legal umbrella for publishers of factual information such as courtroom decisions and professional directories. The measures would be similar to the copyright laws that protect music, novels and other creative works.
The bill has not yet been introduced, but the Judiciary Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a joint hearing on the bill in the coming weeks, a Commerce Committee spokesman said.
Backers of the measure say it would allow database providers to protect themselves against those who simply cut and paste databases to resell them or to make them available for free online.
Violators could be shut down and forced to pay triple the damages incurred.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and consumer advocates said they plan to write letters of protest soon, arguing that the bill could dramatically limit the public's access to information. Database providers can protect themselves through terms-of-service agreements with their customers, said Joe Rubin, director of congressional and public affairs at the chamber.
"We think this is already dealt with under license and contract law, and there's no reason to extend beyond that," Rubin said.
Sometimes user agreements do not provide enough protection, said Keith Kupferschmid, a policy expert with the Software and Information Industry Association, which supports the bill.
In one instance, a Minnesota magazine publisher had no legal recourse when its entire directory of local schools was copied and redistributed. In other cases, operators of pornographic Web sites have copied real estate listings and lawyers' directories to lure in unwitting visitors, he said.
The law could help those who make information available for free online, Kupferschmid said. Reuters America, a unit of Reuters Group, is a member of the trade group.
"If database producers know they have some law to fall back on, when someone steals their database, they'll be much more willing to get that information out there for free," he said. "Without that law, there's really nothing to protect them."
Mike Godwin, senior technology counsel at the nonprofit group Public Knowledge, said the bill would likely make information less freely available.
"Information, when not copyrighted, is something that can be shared. Once you start putting fences around information...there's no freedom of inquiry," said Godwin.
"That doesn't make us smarter, it makes us dumber," he said.
© 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Court decisions as private property?
No, but a compilation thereof may be.
No. The key issue is originality and creatvity.
Basic information arranged alphabetically should not be entitled to copyright protection.
I would apply a similar copyright, btw, to certain types of publication of public-domain materials. For example, if someone finds what is believed to be the only existing copy of a movie made in 1919, under today's copyright law there is a disincentive to allowing any unmodified copy of that film to see the light of day, since the person who has the film could release a modified version with a 95+ year copyright but--if the original got out--the person would have to compete in the marketplace against the free public-domain version. IMHO that's a serious defect (actually one of many) in copyright law that needs to be fixed.
In simple cases, that is certainly true. In complex cases, though, there should be some form of protection (though a 95-year copyright would be ridiculous as it is for just about everything else). After all, even when information is readily available, the act of compiling it in certain ways may represent a considerable investment in time and money; few people are apt to make such an investment if other people can immediately take it with the person who put in the work getting nothing.
As an example, it would probably be useful to have that portion of the Oxford English Dictionary published prior to 1922 available on CD-ROM. The text is all in the public-domain, but to my knowledge is not publicly available anywhere in machine-readable form. For someone to scan and proof the text from such an edition would be a large undertaking, but not beyond the realm of feasibility. On the other hand, in today's legal climate, there would be no way for a person to get any sort of proprietary protection for their efforts unless they published only a modified version of the original, for which they could then claim a 95-year copyright. To my mind, there's something wrong with this; the incentive for a work like that should be to produce a work that mirrors the original as closely as possible, and yet there are strong disincentives to doing so.
Under existing copyright law, if I happen upon the only copy of a public-domain movie, I can release the film with a few arbitrary changes and claim a 95-year copyright. If the original ever "escapes", people would be able to freely copy the original without paying me a dime, but if the original never escapes people who want to see the film would have to pay me even if their only interest was seeing the parts of the movie which are--or should be--in the public domain.
Therefore, I would--if I didn't care about film history--have a financial incentive to ensure that nobody ever gets their hands on the original of the film. Even though the film's copyright expired decades ago, it would have a new copyright--registered to me--until at least the year 2098. This despite the fact that my only real contribution to the film was having the good fortune to acquire it.
To my mind, that is crazy. Copyright laws should provide incentives to publish materials which are in the public domain--not bury them. Unfortunately, today's copyright laws do just the opposite. Adding a short-term "restoration copyright" to the legal system and requiring that people who publish works primarily based on public-domain sources only be able to get a full copyright on their works if they make available their original sources under a restoration copyright would undo these perverse incentives.
BTW, allowing certain short-term protections for laboriously-derived works even when the works are not creatively-derived would be far less of a constitutional stretch than the retroactive copyright extensions the Supreme Court has already deemed acceptable.
Map companies do this too. As an example, practically every page of every Rand McNally atlas you've ever held in your hands contains some tiny little burg, side street or road that doesn't exist. If those fake sites end up on some other company's maps, GOTCHA!
They're pretty good at it, too ... I've never managed to come across a site or road on a map that I know does not and never did exist. They really know how to hide the fakes in ways that won't inconvenience legitimate users.
The junkmailers and telemarketers got what they wanted. We now pay for it with 27million cases of identity theft.
This proposed legislation would not appear to outlaw that.
Wake me when Congress is going to do something for the citizens. I could care less if someone is bitching that they paid for private information to compile a database and then someone else bought and resold it verbatim ("They even kept my entry field names, "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa").
Outlaw the trafficking of such info to begin with. Force interested parties to log their presence at the court house if they want to look up your housing information. Force them to make repeated requests to the Driver's License board. There are legal routes to go to acquire this information. Allowing private interests to compile up and resell such databases should not have been tolerated.
The existance of such databases (without the outlawing of the sale of such information) means that even if future laws restrict public offices from providing private information, someone somewhere will already have it on file ready to sell (legally).
I would apply a similar copyright, btw, to certain types of publication of public-domain materials. For example, if someone finds what is believed to be the only existing copy of a movie made in 1919, under today's copyright law there is a disincentive to allowing any unmodified copy of that film to see the light of day, since the person who has the film could release a modified version with a 95+ year copyright but--if the original got out--the person would have to compete in the marketplace against the free public-domain version. IMHO that's a serious defect (actually one of many) in copyright law that needs to be fixed.
While I believe in letting works lapse into the public domain, I do not support bottom feeders waiting for someone else to spend to money to restore something. If you alter a work significantly (something like 30%) you are supposed to be able to apply for a new copyright of that work. This does not mean that you own all presentations of that work, but it does mean that others are not entitled to leach off of your copy. I would not support the 95+ year endlessly renewable copyrights for such works; they were borrowed works to begin with and 28 years should be more than enough to recoup expenses. If such a work truly is the most complete restoration of a work, then in 28 years it will likely still be the most complete restoration and should be accessible by all who wish to enjoy what was (and should remain) a public domain work.
The Mona Lisa is not copyrighted or trademarked but access to the Mona Lisa with a camera can be limited (since it hangs in a museum) and new photos of the work can be licensed by the owner. It doesn't mean that the owner can prohibit all representations of the work, just control access to the best source for repesentations (the work itself).
As copyright law stands, people do copyright restored versions (or solitary prints) of public domain books and movies. I am just against giving them the overly extended copyrights that were intended to last no longer than the life of the creator. Preservation is not creation (if it is, then the preservationist is reinterpreting the work; restoration should always be reversable).
This is just another excuse to kill the internet and take more of our freedoms away.
I always wondered what the oppisite extreme of book burning was. Now I know.
The problem, beyond the fact that 95-year copyrights are obscene to begin with, is that there is a strong disincentive for someone who controls the original public domain version of a work to allow any public-domain copies ever to be made. IMHO there's something wrong with that. If people go through the effort of retrieving a public-domain work, they should not be required to botch it up with their own modifications in order to protect their efforts.
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