[BlazingArizona]

Patent and copyright, which started out as a decent concept 200 years ago, is now totally out of control. Soon, SCO and the RIAA will claim rights to every human thought.

Burn everything! (To your CD drive)

[antiRepublicrat]

Talk about turning long-held aspect of copyright completely on its head just because a special interest group bribed contributed to a few congresscritters. Nevermind, already happened with copyright terms, so why not what can get copyrighted. But at least the change to infinite copyright was gradual.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The sole purpose of modern-day intellectual property law is to enable lawyers to own everything... even YOUR phone number.

[secretagent]

The pioneer spirit yet lives!

[meadsjn]

Welcome to the New Dark Age.

[bvw]

It is Euro-puke served up in fine cyrstal to the dim-wits in the House:

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved HR 3261 (the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act") on January 21. As this bill represents yet another discouraging expansion of American copyright law, it merits a look. For those who want to read the full text, it is available in PDF format.

Unlike many bad intellectual property ideas, database protection is an idea being imported into the U.S. from Europe. Efforts to prevent the "misappropriation" of databases have been ongoing for some time; the first version of the current proposal - based on the 1996 EU database directive -- was considered in 1996. It did not pass, but anybody who has watched the legislative system in operation has learned that these things keep coming back until the interests behind them finally get what they want. That would appear to be happening here.

(Source: "HR 3261 and the ownership of facts", http://lwn.net/Articles/68462/ )

Are there men who are sons of men still in the House, that will act to toss this bilge-water out?

[Spruce]

Someone cannot secure thier databases from a friggin HTTP spider and they call a lawyer? Dopes.

[bvw]

They cry to the L-rd in their adversity, From their distress He delivers them,
And causes them to tread in a right way, To make it a City of Life.
They proclaim to the L-rd His kindness, And His wonders to the sons of men.
For He hath satisfied a longing soul, And a hungry soul hath filled with goodness.

And that's stolen from DATABASE too! Come after me, for pilfering it ... if you dare, those of you who are with the dim-wit legislators!

[Political Junkie Too]

Fine.

If my name, address, phone number, SSN, driver's license number, credit card number, bank account number, etc., are in their databases, then I want a royalty from every fee that they receive.

-PJ

[American_Centurion]

Funny. The Database owners complain about theft. That is a simple failure to secure your information, I guess their outsouced security engineer is cheaper vice better.

Additionally, where in the heck do these "owners" get the bulk of their information? From doing basically the same thing as the "thiefs" are doing to them. I guess they want finders keepers in place for public information.

Lawyers, you've got to hate them.

[twigs]

This isn't new. A similar measure, with Bill Clinton's approval, was attempted in the summer of 1997. The head of the Library of Congress, I believe, was working with it. Genealogists went to bat and swamped their elected representatives' offices with calls. It was defeated.

[Styria]

This sounds good to me. They're not owning facts. They're owning collections of facts, subject to fair use. It's just like how the publisher or translator owns the rights to the text of the Bible I use. Their website states:

The ESV text may be quoted (in written, visual, or electronic form) up to and inclusive of one thousand (1,000) verses without express written permission of the publisher, providing that the verses quoted to not amount to a complete book of the Bible nor do the verses quoted account for 50 percent or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted.

Before you whine that the compilers of these databases got the information from somewhere else themselves, remember that they too would be subject to this law, and also that they did all the effort in the sorting and presentation of the data. I wish you guys would find a real news article about this topic, rather than an editorial from Wired....

[An.American.Expatriate]

Commercial database companies say they invest millions of dollars in collecting, editing and organizing information for their customers, but don't have adequate protection to prevent someone from stealing the information to compete with them.

Solution: get the state to make an overreaching law to "protect" them?? Come on, if the are really investing "millions" to gain the information, then they can obviously spare a couple of bucks to secure thier databases (and I know of a programmer willing to do the work for a "modest" fee :-) )