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That's MY data you're asserting ownership of!

by Prometheus 6
December 2, 2003 - 11:47am.
on News

Or is it?

I'm just lifting this from Slashdot:

"With all of the furor over the Patriot Act a truly scary bill that expands the rights of corporations at the expense of individuals was quietly introduced into congress in October. In Feist v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. the Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted. But H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act neatly sidesteps the copyright question and allows treble damages to be levied against anyone who uses information that's in a database that a corporation asserts it owns. This is an issue that crosses the political spectrum. Left-leaning organizations like the American Library Association oppose the bill and so do arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who wrote an impassioned column exposing the bill for what it is the week after it was introduced."


I can see the arguments…that data about you doesn't necessarily belong to you.

I haven't read the linked editorials because I KNOW this sucks.

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Submitted by mark safranski (not verified) on December 2, 2003 - 1:36pm.

Agreed.

Submitted by dof (not verified) on December 2, 2003 - 3:52pm.

This part looks like a good start to claim it is not content neutral: the bill discriminates between reasonable speech and unreasonable speech.Claiming the bill it is not narrowly tailored is left as an exercise for the reader....The making available in commerce of a substantial part of a database by a nonprofit educational, scientific, and research institution, including an employee or agent of such institution acting within the scope of such employment or agency, for nonprofit educational, scientific, and research purposes shall not be prohibited by section 3 if the court determines that the making available in commerce of the information in the database is reasonable under the circumstances...

Submitted by don (not verified) on December 2, 2003 - 6:16pm.

Under this bill would this mean that blogger.com owns outright the contents of a person's personal blog?

Submitted by P6 (not verified) on December 2, 2003 - 7:53pm.

That's a good question Don. I think the answer is yes.If you're a CD ripper like me, then your software probably connects to CDDB, a database of information about CDs, to build ID3 tags automatically.CDDB was originally a volunteer effort. They decided to sell licenses to their API. People got mad, started FreeDB, but CDDB has such a head start, they're still the better service. They don't charge YOU. They charge software developers.And yes, they own the database.