Legal/Government

Database protection bill

C-Net covers the latest crap bill in Congress: "Tech firms fail to squelch database bill":

A congressional panel on Wednesday approved a proposal to curb database copying, ignoring the objections of technology companies that launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to kill the proposal.

. . .

The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy. Its supporters say that such protection is necessary to stop rivals from extracting information from proprietary databases like Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis service instead of going through the far more expensive process of compiling it themselves.

This bill is another classic case of companies wanting to change the law in order to protect their business models without regard to freedom of innovate. Currently facts are not copyrightable, which means that the data in a phone book can be copied at will, since phone numbers are facts. Changing this would allow database operators (including MusicBrainz) more control and legal choices for protecting the content in their databases.

However, there is an evil downside to this -- identifiers are facts and the upcoming semantic web (if it ever shows up) relies heavily upon identifiers. If these identifiers could all of the sudden be copyrighted it would make it illegal to link to a net resource that uses copyrighted identifiers. This would be a severe blow to the sematic web, especially in light of the current copyright climate where everything is copyrighted by default.

No bueno all around. I hope this bill gets tossed.

Posted by Mayhem at January 28, 2004 02:58 PM