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November
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ACTION ALERT:
The Use Of Public Domain Statistics May Be Under Seige |
What does this mean? Well, I wasn't sure at first if this was just another prank Net missive or something more serious. I received an alert that was sent a message, titled "Government Proposes New Regulation of Sports Statistics and other 'facts'" from a mailing list called TelecomReg. The gist of the message was that there was a pending U.S. contribution to an international treaty organization, plus matching Congressional legislation, that would make it virtually impossible to publish statistics and other data. Including sporting event statistics.To determine the seriousness of this purported threat, I jetted on over to the Consumer Project on Technology home page and realized the threat was all too real. The introduction to the paper by James Love says it all:
"Sports fans in the United States will be surprised to learn that U.S. Government officials are pressing for the adoption of an International treaty that will (if enacted) significantly change the ways sports statistics are controlled and disseminated. The treaty isn't specifically directed at sports statistics--it is a much broader attempt to create a new property right in facts and other data now in the public domain--but it will have an enormous impact on the legal rights exercised by the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL) and virtually all other professional or amateur athletic leagues. (The same treaty will radically affect the way that stock prices, weather data, train schedules, data from AIDS research and other facts are controlled, but this note will focus on the issue of sports statistics, a topic that illustrates the broad impact of the treaty)."Why is this proposal being pursued? In another primer by Love, he says:
"The database treaty is being pushed by large publishing companies, in response to the 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service. In Feist , the Court rejected a claim of copyright for data from a telephone directory's white pages, saying that facts cannot be copyrighted, and that obvious items such as listing names, addresses, and telephone numbers in alphabetical order, are not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. The decision rejected the "sweat of the brow" theory of copyright."I did some further digging at the site, and conclusion is firm--fair use rights for all sorts of statistics, as well as potentially all published works, is in jeopardy. The basic message is the same, whether I look at it from the foes of this proposal, the industry supporters of this proposal, or the actual U.S. legislation. I would not be allowed to use the statistics in any way, shape or form, and probably wouldn't even be allowed to link to the statistics without specific approval. Further, the definition of what constitutes database records is broad enough to include just about any written material, because most written material is stored electronically in what could be argued is a database-type structure.
This is a serious threat to the long-held intellectual property rights standards in the U.S. I urge you to read up on both sides of the issue (maybe you actually agree with the publishers point-of-view, but I don't) and then write letters to your Congressmen and Senators to ask what they know about this legislation and what their positions are. Additionally, there is a small window to provide public comments before the U.S. adopts its position for the international treaty meeting in December.
We must be firm, rational, and insistent in our approach to stop this process. The end run of the special interests, who are trying to monopolize information in this new information. IMO, information deserves to be free and available to widest audience possible for the lowest possible price (ideally, free). Otherwise, stagnation will occur and advancement will be impossible. Creators of new ideas deserve protection, but I question the applicability to owners of facts that are not created.
- Current issues releated to intellectual property. This is the central site for intellectual property issues. This issue I am calling attention to is the Database Extraction Rights.
- James Love, "HREF="http://www.essential.org/cpt/ip/wipo-sports.html">Government Proposes New Regulation of Sports Statistics and other 'facts'."
- James Love, "HREF="http://www.essential.org/cpt/ip/cpt-dbcom.html">A Primer On The Proposed WIPO Treaty On Database Extraction Rights That Will Be Considered In December 1996."
- Information Industry Association (IIA). Industry Perspectives on Database Protection. This is the main front organization supporting the proposal.
- Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy act of 1996 (H.R.3531). This is the implementing legislation for the treaty that was submitted to the last Congress. It contains no fair use rights for data stored in databases.
- WIPO's Basic Proposal for Substantive Provisions of the Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Databases, dated 30 August 1996, is the main proposed treaty text.
- We have until November 22 to comment on the briefing held yesterday. The Request for Comments on the Chairman's Text is here. The briefing is currently unavailable.
wtf 13 November 1996
