In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Supid Bills - and your congress
Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine
...the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261) makes it a crime for anyone to copy and redistribute a substantial portion of data collected by commercial database companies and list publishers. But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts -- stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say.
The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill and the commerce committee is expected to review it on Thursday.
The bill's biggest backers are the Software and Information Industry Association; Reed Elsevier, which owns the LexisNexis database; and Westlaw, the biggest publisher of legal databases.
Art Brodsky, spokesman for public advocacy group Public Knowledge, says the bill would let anyone drop a fact into a database or a collection of materials and claim monopoly rights to it. This would contradict the core principle of the Copyright Act, which states that mere information and ideas cannot be protected works.
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.
You want to kill any future innovation in America and make us a third world nation within thirty years? Pass this bill.
Seriously, innovative industries will move to other countries to avoid this law. The Misappropriation Act is a fine example of how to put brakes on innovation, thought, and education. Let you congress persons know!
- rob 1:19 PM - [PermaLink] -
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