Database law... silver lining??

[Richard L. Field]

   I am not suggesting patent-like protection.  Rather, I'd argue that there
is very little "independent creation" with respect to my personal database.
Provided it is considered my database to begin with, information that I give
on a warranty card, when I ask for credit, etc. remains mine under the
proposed U.S. law.  Just because a third party tries to assemble it from
those sources doesn't mean it suddenly becomes free data, from a
non-database source.  By that line of reasoning, any protected database
would lose all protection upon its publication by a licensee, so long as you
copied it from the licensee and not the originator.  This is not how I read
the proposed law, and it is not how big database publishers would want it read.

   - Richard Field

(Nothing in this line of argument is meant to imply that I am in favor of
the proposal.)



At 11:47 PM 11/21/96 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:

[my proposal snipped]
>
>Cute, but any such proposal is almost guaranteed to allow for independent
>creation from a non-database source - e.g., warranty cards, info extracted
>from you when you ask for credit, public records, etc. For example, one
>comment to Article 3 of the proposed WIPO treaty on sui generis protection
>of databases provides:
>
>"3.02 The protection provided does not preclude any person from
>independently collecting, assembling or compiling works, data or materials
>from any source other than a protected database."
>
>(see <http://www.loc.gov/copyright/wipo6.html> for more.)
>
>It's very unlikely that Congress (or the PTO) intends to do anything
>that'll screw up what's already working well for big database publishers.
>Your theory is similar to a patent flavor for databases, while the
>proposals floated out so far are much more like copyright - e.g.,
>independent creation is OK, but copying is not, even with wide public
>distribution, and long protection times. With patent, independent creation
>is not OK, copying (the information, not the device) is encouraged/allowed,
>and protection time is short.