Database Protection Legislation
The topic of extending protection to databases rears its complex head again, according to a
Yahoo! News article:
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are circulating a proposed bill that would prevent wholesale copying of school guides, news archives and other databases which do not enjoy copyright protection.
All of which sounds like a good idea, except that such proposed laws end up protecting very broad gatherings of public, factual information such as
U.S. Court legal decisions and
sports scores:
Information, when not copyrighted, is something that can be shared. Once you start putting fences around information ... there's no freedom of inquiry," said Godwin, who frequently criticizes copyright-protection measures he deems overzealous.
"That doesn't make us smarter, it makes us dumber," he said.
Much discussion about this issue centers on (often unstated) assumptions about what counts as creativity: copyrighted works are, by definition, creative acts in which some intangible creativity must be protected for limited periods. Databases are frequently (but not always) based on simple factual data. Earlier court decisions on this topic have rejected claims of creativity for databases because they are not "creative" (see, e.g.,
HyperLaw v Westlaw).
But when we move into a postmodern era, what counts as creativity? We (or at least most of us) don't operate under the notion that creative genius springs from some mysterious, otherworldly place, disconnected from reality. Rather, we've begun to understand that creativity operates
within social contexts, as a response to and interaction with the world around the author. And in that realization, "creativity" becomes a very complicated concept: where do ideas come from? Is the author any longer the sole generator of new ideas? Do some forms of authorship depend primarily on the ability to move existing ideas around, to break them apart and recombine them in new and useful ways?
Which brings us to databases. As gatherings of small, discrete facts (in themselves uncreative and uninteresting), do databases become creative and interesting at a second level?
Much of this is a moot point: Databases are typically covered under license agreements, which sidestep copyright and prevent (legally, anyway) users from merely "cutting and pasting" (as critics say) to pirate it. It's not clear what the people behind the proposed legislation are after, except to make the protection for databases even more broadly based and less open to discussion (which doesn't strike me as a good thing).
(See some earlier work I did on this--unfortunately not in web formats: A 330k PowerPoint file of a talk I gave at the 2001 Watson Conference on Rhetoric and a 130k MS Word file of a section of book I co-authored for Utah Press with Anne Wysocki, Cindy Selfe, and Geoff Sirc that's in press.)
Posted by johndan at September 8, 2003 07:48 AM
| TrackBack