GearBits

Copyrights: Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse

According to Wired, the US Congress is considering a bill that would let owners of databases and lists of information claim copyright protection on the contents of those collections of information. This is in direct violation of the very essence of traditional US copyright law, which has been based on the idea that nobody can own a fact.

The Wired article gives a few examples of some of the unintended effects this legislation might have if it is passed:

"Under the terms of the broadly written bill, a public-health website could be deemed in violation of the law for gathering a list of the latest health headlines and providing links to them on its home page.

Google would be in violation for trolling media databases and providing stories on its news page.

An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date."

The companies who are pushing the bill, including "the Software and Information Industry Association; Reed Elsevier, which owns the LexisNexis database; and Westlaw, the biggest publisher of legal databases," don't get it. According to the article, "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."

My response to them is this: It's not the information that you should be relying on to make you competitive; your service and the value that you add through how you interact with your customers is what should differentiate you from anybody else with access to the same information. Information cannot, and should not, be able to be owned by any one entity -- generating value, the basis for profitability, should instead come from the actions that support and enrich that information.

Beyond that, existing copyright laws already protect your databases if someone else takes off with a large part of it -- no additional laws are necessary to support you in that regard.

Protecting each individual piece of information in a database is a dangerous concept for our Congress to even be considering. The mere fact that it has made it as far as it has speaks very clearly as to the state of (at least some of) our elected national officials: either they are too incompetent (or ignorant) to understand the implications of this concept or they are disappointingly ready to completely disregard public welfare in order to support their special interests. Either way, it's bad news for us citizens.