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.Are there men who are sons of men still in the House, that will act to toss this bilge-water out?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/ )
That's strange. Bad copyright laws usually start in the U.S. and spread outwards.