Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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RE: virus: Coming Soon: Companies Copyrighting Facts
« on: 2004-03-16 16:50:35 » |
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[Blunderov]I have also heard that there were moves afoot by someone to
patent the human genome.
It seems that increasingly, the flow information in many spheres is
being restricted, whether for commercial or security reasons.
Here in SA you now have to pay an annual fee to belong to a library. It
is quite a small amount of money but it nevertheless must be a deterrent
to very many who simply have no money to spare at all. The libraries
have been forced to take this step because they are so badly funded.
This does not bode well for the internet. Here in SA there is much
unhappiness about some draft legislation that, so far, has it in mind to
force anyone who has a website to obtain a licence.
Hopefully this will not come to pass. There seems to be a strong lobby
which is representing the argument that this legislation will tend to
muffle the IT industry and cost the country jobs and skills.
I hope they prevail.
Best Regards
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/069999.htm?terms=n610b
March 09, 2004
Coming Soon: Companies Copyrighting Facts
The standard concept of copyright in America is that you cannot
copyright facts. You can copyright the way facts are presented, but not
the facts themselves. Thus, a recipe for a cake cannot be copyrighted,
but the way the recipe is presented and the way the instructions are
expressed can. Some people wish to change this now and have a law passed
that would allow them to exercise copyrights over facts - a move that
would be devastating to intellectual freedom and progress.
Kim Zetter writes for Wired about the Database and Collections of
Information Misappropriation Act which is moving through Congress:
Ostensibly, 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.
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. ... 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 law of
unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge,"
Brodsky said.
If a bill like this passes, a lot of the information that is distributed
in society could be locked down by "owners" who insist that they be
allowed to control how that information is distributed. If they don't
want certain people to have access to information, they could deny it to
them - owners of legal databases, for example, could deny access to
liberal or conservative groups, depending upon the owners' political
stance. And, if they are willing to permit someone access, it would be
in exchange for a hefty fee along with a promise not to pass the
material along to anyone else.
When facts and information can be controlled by a few - by the rich and
powerful - democracy itself is threatened in a fundamental way. The
government wouldn't be permitted to do this and neither should larger
corporations.
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