Appeals Court Says You Can Copyright A Collection Of Facts... If You Leave Out A Few

from the wait,-what? dept

The 9th Circuit is at it again with copyright. For whatever reason, when the 9th Circuit gets a copyright case, it frequently seems to mess everything up about it. This latest case -- Experian v. Nationwide Marketing Services -- is no exception. One of the most famous, and most important, copyright cases to hit the Supreme Court was the Feist case. We've mentioned it many times before. The short summary is that a phone book publisher had inserted a few "fake" names and numbers into its book to try to catch copycats. It found one, and sued for copyright infringement. The Supreme Court rejected it, noting that copyright does not apply to facts, and clearly rejecting any notion that mere "sweat of the brow" in collecting facts gives you a copyright.

This was good. But... there was one part of the ruling that still left open the potential for mischief, and appeals courts have been making mischief in that loophole ever since. Here's the issue: 17 USC 103 allows for copyright in "compilations," though it notes this copyright "only extends to" the creative input in making the compilation, and not the underlying works (whether they are covered by copyright or not). The common sense explanation of this is that if, say, you're putting together (with the proper licenses) a "best of..." CD (let's say "Best of the 70's"), then you can have a copyright on that compilation. Not in the underlying songs, which you've licensed properly, but in the creativity in choosing the 7, 12, 15 or whatever number of songs, and the order you've placed them in. That requires some creativity, and it may be enough to get a fairly narrow copyright.

In Feist, the question was whether or not putting together all the phone numbers and names was covered by that compilation setup, and the Supreme Court said no. A mere collection of facts has no creative element and thus can't be considered a compilation for the purpose of establishing a new copyright. That's good. But the opinion bent over backwards to suggest that lots of other compilations of data might have the requisite creativity. And... far too many courts have taken the Supreme Court up on that proposition, potentially eviscerating the valuable promises of Feist.

That takes us to this case. Here, Experian, as you're probably aware, is one of the massive consumer data services, and one of its databases, the ConsumerView Database, contains around 250 million records about individual consumers, pairing together their names and addresses. Names and addresses. This seems pretty damn similar to Feist's names and phone numbers, right? Well, an upstart data collection company, Nationwide Marketing Services (or Natimark) somehow got its hands on a database called the National Consumer List, with about 200 million records. At some point, it tried to sell that database to Experian (apparently, the whole market is somewhat incestuous in passing around and selling data back and forth between each other, using different databases to mix and match and keep things up to date).

Experian analyzed the data from the Natimark NCL list and found that it was way too close to its own ConsumerView Database (CVD), finding it 97% the same (a later analysis said 94%). Thus, this lawsuit. To me, this seems like a pretty clear application of Feist. Names and addresses is factual information, there's no copyright in the compilation, toss the case. And that's what the district court originally found. Experian tried again, now using trade secrets. Once again, the district court said "nuh-uh." The case was then appealed to the 9th Circuit Appeals Court... who really messed it up and decided that, yes, Experian can have a copyright in the compilation.

The opinion goes through a long list of other data compilation cases, with rulings on either side, and finally says there's enough creativity in the collection. Why? For two key reasons. First, Experian's database left some people out -- such as the elderly. By not including the "entire relevant universe known to it," the court concludes that it has made creative choices in what not to include. Second, Experian employees had to make some decisions about which address goes with which people. Specifically, in compiling these databases from multiples sources they may find that there are multiple possible addresses for an individual, and Experian employees had to choose which address to put down. And that, in the minds of the 9th Circuit, is the level of creativity necessary to get a copyright.

Experian’s selection process in culling data from multiple sources and selecting the appropriate pairing of addresses with names before entering them in the database involves a process of at least minimal creativity. The listings are compiled by first collecting and comparing multiple sources, and then sorting conflicting information through the creation of business rules that Experian created to select from among the conflicts. As the Fifth Circuit said in Mason, selection is sufficiently creative when the compiler makes “choices . . . independently . . . to select information from numerous and sometimes conflicting sources.”

But... that seems an awful lot like bringing back the "sweat of the brow" argument. It's not creative choices being made here. It's choices around which information is correct -- i.e., factual.

The exclusion of elderly people also seems like a bizarre factor on which to judge "creativity."

Experian’s employees, like the compiler in Key Publications, also exclude information they deem irrelevant to the interests of Experian’s marketing clients, information such as business addresses, and the names and addresses of the very elderly and incarcerated. See 945 F.2d at 513. Such exclusions indicate some “thought and creativity in the selection” of names and addresses to include in the database, id., which indicates the “modicum of creativity necessary to transform mere selection into copyrightable expression.”

But, under that standard, it would seem that Feist itself was decided incorrectly. Remember, the whole reason why Feist became a case in the first place was because the original phone book had added fake names and numbers. How is that any different than choosing to exclude names of old people? Indeed, you could make an argument that adding in fake numbers requires more creativity than excluding factual data on old people.

Under this standard, it seems quite easy to basically wipe out Feist entirely. If you want a copyright on your big collection of purely factual data, drop a few entries that no one needs, and claim that was your creative choice.

In this case, Experian still probably isn't thrilled with the result, since after establishing that Experian can have a copyright in the compilation, it then says Experian failed to actually prove infringement. The court notes that to prove infringement of a compilation, you need to show that basically the entire compilation was copied. But, here that was not shown.

In this case, the Experian database that was allegedly infringed was one updated through September 2011. Neither that entire database nor Natimark’s entire, allegedly infringing database was introduced into evidence, and perhaps as a practical matter could not have been. Nevertheless, there must be sufficient evidence of content to make a fair comparison....

Experian contends that it has established a triable issue as to copying by offering the opinion of an expert that the match rate between Experian files and the allegedly infringing Natimark files is higher than the match rate between the files of Experian and one of its legitimate licensees. Experian asks us to hold that it has presented circumstantial evidence of copying sufficient to send the case to a jury. It fails to cite any authority from this circuit or elsewhere permitting infringement to be established on the basis of circumstantial evidence, and in the absence of any direct comparisons.

It also points out that Experian's own evidence shows that the Natimark database was only 80% the size of Experian's, and that's not enough to show that the entire compilation was copied. So that dooms Experian's copyright argument. But, still, the decision that the copyright exists in the first place is quite troubling and could create all sorts of trouble. It will enable a fake "sweat of the brow" right, which should be cause for concern. This could have all been avoided if everyone recognized that compilation copyrights shouldn't be for merely collecting giant tubs of factual data, but compilations of copyright-protected material. Unfortunately, Congress (perhaps stupidly) included the term "data" in its definition of compilation. It would be nice if Congress rectified this mess by deleting that word from the definition, but there's little chance of that happening any time soon...

As we were just discussing, the US's lack of a "database right" as found in Europe, has actually been a huge boon to innovation, especially on the internet. This ruling could create some problems for that by establishing a de facto database right, if the initial compiler takes a few meaningless steps to establish the modicum of "creativity" necessary to satisfy the court here. And, of course, it's still not clear why adding in fake info doesn't qualify, while deleting a few entries does.

For what it's worth, the court also overturned the lower court's ruling on trade secrets, saying that there's enough evidence to say a jury should determine whether or not Experian's database is covered by trade secret law. This is... also bad, but wading into the huge mess that is trade secret law is something that will probably cause me to start banging my head repeatedly on the wall, and I really have no desire to do that right now. Perhaps another time.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, compilations, copyright, creativity, data, database rights, facts, feist
Companies: experian, natimark

Norwegian Court Orders Website Of Public Domain Court Decisions Shut Down With No Due Process

from the this-is-messed-up dept

What's up Europe? We've been talking a lot about insanity around the new copyright directive, but the EU already has some pretty messed up copyright/related rights laws on the books that are creating absurd situations. The following is one of them. One area where US and EU laws differ is on the concept of the "database right." The US does not grant a separate copyright on a collection of facts. The EU does. Studies have shown how this is horrible idea, and if you compare certain database-driven industries in the US and the EU, you discover how much damage database rights do to innovation, competition and the public. But, alas, they still exist. And they continue to be used in positively insane ways.

Enter Hakon Wium Lie. You might know him as basically the father of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Or the former CTO of the Opera browser. Or maybe even as the founder of the Pirate Party in Norway. Either way, he's been around a while in this space, and knows what he's talking about. Via Boing Boing we learn that: (1) Wium Lie has been sued for a completely absurd reason of (2) helping a site publish public domain court rulings that (3) are not even protected by a database right and (4) the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff (5) in 24 hours (6) before Lie could respond and (7) ordered him to pay the legal fees of the other side.

I've numbered these because I had to break out each absurd part separately just to start to try to comprehend just how ridiculous the whole thing is. And now, let's go through how each part is absurd in turn:

1. Wium Lie is being sued as an accomplice to the site rettspraksis.no by an operation called Lovdata. Wium Lie tells the entire history in his post, but way back in the early days of the web, while he was helping to create CSS, Wium Lie also helped put Norway's (public domain) laws online. At the time, that same company, Lovdata, was charging people $1-per-minute to access the laws. Really. Eventually, Lovdata dropped the fees and is the official free publishers of the laws in Norway. Of course, statutory law is just one part of "the law." Case law is also quite important and (thankfully) court orders (that make up the bulk of case law) are also in the public domain in Norway. However, Lovdata charges an absurd $1,500 per year to access those decisions. And, it claims a database right* on the collection it makes available online.

2. And yet, Wium Lie is still being sued. Why? When he saw that the website rettspraksis.no was trying to collect and publish these decisions, he borrowed Lovdata CD-ROMs from the National Library in Oslo. He borrowed the 2002 version of the CD-ROM. This date is important, because the EU's database rights last for... 15 years. 2002 databases (and, yes, Wium Lie points out that it's odd to call a stack of documents a database...) are no longer protected by the database rights.

3. So, yeah, the data is clearly in the public domain, and Wium Lie didn't violate anyone's copyright or database rights. Wium Lie notes that Lovdata didn't even try to contact him or rettspraksis.no before suing, but just told the court that they must be scraping the expensive online database:

I'm very surprised that Lovdata didn't contact us to ask us where we had copied the court decisions from. In the lawsuit, they speculate that we have siphoned their servers by using automated «crawlers». And, since their surveillance systems for detecting siphoning were not triggered, our crawlers must have been running for a very long time, in breach of the database directive. The correct answer is that we copied the court decisions from the old discs I found in the National Library. We would have told them this immediately if they had simply asked.

4. This is the most perplexing to me in all of this. I can't read the Norwegian verdict (which, for Lovdata's lawyers, I did not get from scraping your site!), and don't know enough about Norwegian law, but this seems positively bizarre to me. It seems to go against fundamental concepts of basic due process, but how could a judge come out with a verdict like this?

5. ?!?>#$@!%#!%!@!%!#%!!

6. Again: is this how due process works in Norway? In the US, of course, there are things like preliminary injunctions that might be granted pretty quickly, but even then -- especially when it comes to gagging speech, there is supposed to be at least some element of due process. Here there appears to have been something close to none. Furthermore, in the US, this kind of thing would only be allowed if one side could show irreversible harm from leaving the site up. It is difficult to see how anyone could legitimately argue irreversible harm for publishing the country's own (public domain) court rulings.

I find it shocking that the judge ordered the take down of our website, rettspraksis.no, within 24 hours of the lawsuit being filed and WITHOUT HEARING ARGUMENTS FROM US. (Sorry for switching to CAPS, but this is really important.) We were ready and available to bring forth our arguments but were never given the chance. Furthermore, upon learning of the lawsuit, we, as a precaution, had voluntarily removed our site. If the judge had bothered to check he would have seen that what he was ordering was already done. There should be a much higher threshold for judges to close websites that just the request of some organization.

7. And, even if this was the equivalent of an injunction, to also tell Wium Lie and rettspraksis.no that they need to pay Lovdata's legal fees is just perplexing.

the two of us, the volunteers, were slapped with a $12,000 fee to cover the fees of Lovdata's own lawyer, Jon Wessel-Aas. So, the judge actually ordered that we had to pay the lawyer from the opposite side, WITHOUT HAVING BEEN GIVEN A CHANCE TO ARGUE OUR CASE.

This whole situation is infuriating. Being sued is a horrible experience in the first place. But the details here pile absurd upon preposterous upon infuriating. The whole database rights concept is already a troublesome thing, but this application of it is positively monstrous. Wium Lie now has some good lawyers working for him, and hopefully this whole travesty will get overturned, but what a clusterfuck.

* A separate tangent that I'll just note here rather than cluttering up all of the above. I was a bit confused to read references to the EU's database directive/database rights, because Norway is not part of the EU. However, since it is a part of the European Economic Area (yes -- this can all get confusing), it has apparently agreed to enact legislation that complies with certain EU Directives, including the Copyright and Database Directives.

Filed Under: caselaw, copyright, court rulings, css, database, database rights, due process, hakon wium lie, norway, public domain
Companies: lovdata, rettspraksis.no

Dutch Government Realizes That Non-Original Works Don't Deserve Copyright

from the about-time dept

For many years, we've discussed how Europe allows for a "database right" on collections of works, while the US forbids it. The US considers a database right improper, since copyright is not supposed to apply to facts and isn't supposed to be given out solely based on the "sweat of the brow," but rather to incentivize creativity. The Europeans, on the other hand, argued that the labor of putting together a database needed to be protected to create the necessary incentives for a thriving information/database industry. In many ways, this has created a useful natural experiment concerning copyright law and whether or not it actually creates incentives. The data has been overwhelming. Without a database right, the database industry in the US has thrived, while the same market in the EU has stagnated.

And yet, many in Europe (and some in the US) still see good things in such a government granted monopoly. We were just talking about how clinging to this outdated and clearly failed concept was now threatening important moves towards open data.

Thankfully, it appears that at least one European country has realized how damaging such rights are, and is moving in the other direction. The Dutch government, which has a number of politicians who really seem to get this stuff, is apparently trying to "modernize" its copyright law by removing protection for any "non-original" works such as databases. The link from the Future of Copyright site notes that the database right -- called "geschriftenbescherming" -- is being removed, as officials are noting that copyright should be focused on creativity, not merely protecting the upfront investments of publishers and printers:

The modernization of copyright law in the Netherlands will be done in two ways. Firstly, modern copyright will only serve to protect creative performances. Since ‘geschriftenbescherming’ does not cover any creative performance, this will now be removed. Secondly, the Dutch government believes copyright should not inadvertently preclude the creative reuse of existing material or the innovative use of information and easy exchange thereof. The protection of non-original works is often invoked to regulate parallel import instead of merely protecting the publisher’s or printer’s investment. By removing the additional protection under copyright law, the exchange and re-use of these works may be simplified. Also this could remove a legal barrier to the use of open data.

As noted in that last sentence, this story is almost the polar opposite to the one we just had about this same concept being used to hold back open data. This would be a nice step forward for the Dutch, and hopefully other European countries will quickly get with the program as well.

Update: In the comments someone points out that this is related to the EU Court of Justice ruling we wrote about last year, which noted that copyright rights need to include an element of creativity and that you can't just copyright facts.

Update 2: More information from the comments, which argues that, despite great similarities between the database right and geschriftenbescherming, this only impacts the latter not the former. The specific issue appears to be that geschriftenbescherming falls under copyright law and copyright law requires creativity (as noted in the story from last year). Yet database rights, fall under the database directive, and don't require any creativity (which is silly, for reasons we explained earlier). We apologize for any confusion and would like to thank the commenter for adding further details.

Filed Under: copyright, creativity, database rights, netherlands, non-creative works

Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There

from the worse-than-useless dept

One of the more benighted moves by the European Union was the introduction of a special kind of copyright for databases in 1996: not for their contents, but for their compilation. This means that even if the contents are in the public domain, the database may not be. Thanks to a recent court judgment in France, this "database right" now threatens to become a real danger for the burgeoning open data movement in Europe (original in French).

The case concerns the site NotreFamille.com ("Our Family"), which wanted to obtain a copy of various public records held in digital form by the department of Vienne in France. These were things like parish records and census information for the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s -- all clearly in the public domain. But the region refused to make the digital versions of the records available, even though NotreFamille.com offered to pay, on the grounds that it had a separate database right in the digitized collection that enabled it to withhold what would otherwise be released as open data:

in order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of Vienne told the court it had "committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000] to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken eight years." This concerns a normal investment made in the context of the public service mission of the department, but it is sufficient, according to the court, to establish that the department is indeed a "database producer" with an exclusive right on the latter that allows it not to meet the requirement of open data.

That's really bad news, since it effectively guts the requirement to make public information freely available as open data, if held in a database that required some effort to put together, as is usually the case. Moreover, other courts in the European Union may well take a similar view, since the database right is Europe-wide.

This is galling because, unlike most copyright legislation, the database right law was followed up with some research commissioned by the EU in order to examine whether the premise -- that providing an additional intellectual monopoly on the database separate from its contents would stimulate extra investment by European publishers -- was in fact true. The evidence was pretty clear (pdf):

Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases. Data taken from the GDD (see Section 4.2.3) show that the EU database production in 2004 has fallen back to pre-Directive levels: the number of EU-based database "entries" into the GDD6 was 3095 in 2004 as compared to 3092 in 1998. In 2001, there were 4085 EU-based"entries" while in 2004 there were only 3095.

So this new monopoly turned out to be a complete flop. Worse, as the current case in Vienne shows, it is now starting to have negative effects on other initiatives. Clearly, the time has come to repeal this legislation before it starts to throttle a potentially important new area for growth in Europe.

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Filed Under: database rights, europe, open data

Real Estate Listing Services Use Questionable Copyright Claims In Attempt To Block Criticism Of Agents

from the i've-got-a-feist-to-show-you dept

We've noted in the past just how incredibly backwards facing the real estate industry is. Last year, I got to present at a real estate industry conference, where I compared how the MLS (multiple-listing service) players were similar to the record labels and music studios, acting as monopolist gatekeepers to information. And, just as the entertainment industry gatekeepers have attacked disruptive innovators with lawsuits, so too do the MLS operations. In the past we've discussed how they've attacked web upstarts like Zillow and Redfin. The latest is that they've gone after NeighborCity, an offering from a company called American Home Realty Network (AHRN), who dared to make use of real estate data to actually rate real estate agents on their performance. As you might imagine, the real estate agents don't like that very much.

AHRN noticed that it suddenly received a flood of complaints and cease & desist letters conveniently timed exactly to the dates of the National Association of Realtors's (NAR's) annual meeting in November of 2011 -- and each of the letter seemed to include similar language. After responding to all of the complaints, two separate MLS providers sued AHRN. Amusingly, prior to the lawsuit, an executive for one of the MLS's (NorthStar, from Minnesota) appeared to accidentally cc AHRN on an email to its lawyer, complaining about "the bad fellow" (AHRN CEO Jonathan Cardella) not simply bending over and taking down NeighborCity in response to the complaints, and suggesting that filing copyright infringement lawsuits against AHRN/NeighborCity would be useful in bringing a "world of hurt" on the company. The email also discusses having various MLSs share the costs of litigation.

Indeed, NorthStar and a separate MLS, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS) appear to have followed through and sued for copyright infringement. You can see MRIS's filing embedded below. MRIS repeatedly insists that it holds a copyright on its database, completely ignoring fairly well-established law that you can't copyright facts, and that MRIS's copyright (if there is one) is limited to the creative works it added to the process. Instead, MRIS repeatedly claims to hold a copyright on the entirety of the database. It also claims to hold the copyrights on the photos uploaded by individual agents, saying that as part of that process, the copyrights are assigned to MRIS.

NeighborCity has hit back with its response (also embedded below), arguing that MRIS has no such copyright, and citing the litany of cases that establish you cannot copyright factual information, relying heavily (of course) on the important Feist ruling in the Supreme Court, which rejected "sweat of the brow" arguments for copyright, and said you cannot copyright a collection of facts, such as a telephone book.

It seems that the chance of succeeding on such a claim is slim to none. MRIS and its lawyers should be slapped around by the judge for even trying such an argument. MRIS clearly seems to recognize this by trying to use the photographs to make a separate argument. It claims that every photograph that is uploaded has its copyright assigned to MRIS (I'm actually a bit surprised that real estate agents would agree to this...) and thus it also alleges infringement on the photos. AHRN, however, points out that MRIS failed to register the individual copyrights on the photos, instead only registering a copyright on the "catalog." Here, AHRN notes (again) that there is widespread precedent limiting what sort of copyright can be applied to a catalog where little to no additional work was done by the party claiming copyright. Further, it points to the Muench case, which noted the "the registrant of a compilation copyright must list the names of the authors of the underlying works." That's just a district court ruling, so it's not clear how big an impact it would have.

AHRN also questions the claim that anything it has done creates irreparable harm to MRIS is completely baseless. MRIS's best argument is that outdated info on NeighborCity reflects poorly on MRIS, but AHRN points out that it would reflect much worse on NeighborCity itself.

The real issue, of course, is almost certainly that the real estate agents don't like the fact that they're being rated by the site. The fact that NeighborCity has operated for years without a problem... until it put up its agent rating service, makes that pretty clear.

The larger issue may be that AHRN is also alleging that the action confirms that real estate agents are violating the final judgment in the antitrust lawsuit the US government filed against the National Association of Realtors. The email that was sent to AHRN certainly seems to indicate plans for concerted action. Combined with the timing correlating to the NAR event... and there's at least a reasonable case for the DOJ to look into the activity here by real estate agents and MLS services.

In the end, though, this is the same story we've seen over and over again. Gatekeepers don't like being disintermediated by disruptive innovation. So, rather than adapt, they sue.

Filed Under: database rights, real estate
Companies: ahrn, mls, nar, northstar

EU Court Ruling Saying Sports Schedules May Not Covered By Copyright Pushes Back On Dangerous Database Copyrights

from the it's-a-step dept

The US has long rejected the idea that you get a copyright in return for the "sweat of your brow." It's not about the labor, it's about the creativity. That's why we don't allow "database rights" -- or copyrights on collections of factual data, such as a phone book. Europe, however, has gone in the other direction, allowing such database rights, much to the chagrin of many experts who recognize that such database rights are economically damaging. The one nice thing about this major difference in Europe and the US is that it's given us some natural experiments to compare like industries from the US with those in Europe. That research has shown that, for all the talk of how copyrights are needed to keep an industry strong, the US database market (where no such copyrights are allowed) has grown at a much faster rate than the European one -- with no significant other differences involved. In other words, the theory that copyright is needed to grow an industry has been proved false. In fact, the situation with the US stance on database copyright presents evidence that you can get greater growth and innovation without copyright -- because there's more openness, more value, and greater opportunities outside of locking down the data.

So a recent ruling that reader aldestrawk brought to our attention is pretty interesting. It involves a case we talked about a few years ago, where a UK court found that sports schedules could be covered by a database copyright, since it took effort to put together. Thus, newspapers and websites couldn't just repost a sports schedule without a license, even though it was just factual information.

It looks like that case got kicked up to the EU Court of Justice, who appears to have given another sensible ruling pushing back on what can be covered by a database copyright. Specifically, it appears the court suggests that a pure "sweat of the brow" argument is not sufficient, and instead, the work needs to show some element of creativity. In fact, it suggests that the copyright in a database copyright doesn't actually cover the data, but merely the creative input into "the structure" of the database.

The fact that the setting up of the database required, irrespective of the creation of the data which it contains, significant labour and skill on the part of its author does not justify, as such, the protection of it by copyright if that labour and that skill do not express any originality in the selection or arrangement of that data.

The court does not make a final ruling on the copyrightability of the football schedules, but kicks it back to the UK court to make a ruling given the EUCJ's guidance. Thus, the court will now have to look at whether there's any actual creativity in setting up the league schedule. It seems that should likely greatly limit the database copyright in the EU. It makes you wonder if others who have thought the database copyright was stronger, might start branching out a bit and experimenting.

Filed Under: copyright, database rights, eu, facts, schedules, sports

Bulgarian Chess Tournament Organizers Sue Website For Reporting Chess Moves, Claim Copyright Infringement

from the is-that-the-spanish-opening-or-the-king's-gambit? dept

Some days you just shake your head in disbelief. A year ago, we wrote about a Bulgarian chess federation was demanding that websites stop broadcasting what moves were happening in its chess tournament, claiming it was a copyright violation. As we noted at the time, you're not supposed to be able to copyright facts, such as chess moves, otherwise it would make playing chess itself pretty damn difficult. It appears that this year, the organizers of this Bulgarian chess festival are taking it up a notch. Jeff T alerts us to the stunning news that they have actually sued a German website for reporting what moves were happening.

The article goes a bit more into the legal strategy, and highlights the insanity of certain copyright laws. As we've discussed in the past, Europe has "database rights" -- a concept the US has (mostly) rejected -- which do grant the ability to apply copyrights on collections of facts, under the slightly warped theory that this kind of incentive is needed to aggregate those facts into a database. Of course, research has been done on this for years, and they prove, without a doubt, that database rights appear to hold back database businesses! Comparing identical industries in the US (without database rights) and Europe (with database rights) shows that the US industries are significantly larger. Thus, if the whole point of the database right is to encourage creation of more databases, it has empirically failed.

And... on top of that, it leads to absolutely nonsensical lawsuits like the one above. The database right is most certainly not intended to protect a list of chess moves. It's intended (though, it fails on this) to provide incentives to create databases. The idea that people would not play chess without a database right is obviously ridiculous. But, the Bulgarian chess folks are insisting the law is on their side. If the case were filed in the US it would be tossed pretty quickly. Hopefully the same is true in Germany as well. There is simply no legitimate reason to block reporting on the factual nature of chess moves.

Filed Under: bulgaria, chess, copyright, database rights

Australian Court Says You Can't Copyright Facts; Phone Books Not Protected

from the no-sweat-of-the-brow dept

sinsi is the first of a few to alert us to another good copyright ruling in Australia (following the recent iiNet ruling -- though the Kookaburra ruling is still pretty bad), finding that (as in the US) a collection of facts alone is not copyrightable. The specific case involved a telephone book, and whether or not the collection of numbers was covered by copyright. The court, smartly, rejected copyright on such a collection of factual information:

"None of the Works were original," Justice Gordon said in her judgement this week.

"None of the people said to be authors of the Works exercised 'independent intellectual effort' or 'sufficient effort of a literary nature' in creating the (directories).'

"Further, if necessary, the creation of the Works did not involve some 'creative spark' or the exercise of the requisite 'skill and judgment'."

There are some places that do allow copyrights on aggregated facts, but a growing body of research has found that such "database rights" or copyrights on aggregated facts tends to hinder innovation rather than encourage it -- and if the purpose of copyright law is to create incentives for new works and for innovation, allowing copyrights on collections of factual information is a bad idea. So, congrats to Australia on another good copyright ruling. Of course, this one will likely be appealed as well, and with lobbyists already pushing to amend copyright law following the iiNet ruling, I'm sure someone will try to change copyright law to include a database right as well, despite all the evidence of how harmful it is overall.

Filed Under: australia, copyright, database rights, facts, phone book

Court Says You Can Copyright Numerical Ratings

from the this-seems-troubling dept

The US, thankfully, still hasn't allowed copyright on databases. There's been a push over the years to allow such a database right, but this is problematic for a variety of reasons -- mainly that it's effectively a way to allow the copyrighting of facts, so long as you put a few of them together. But a bigger issue is that there's empirical evidence that the ability to copyright a database doesn't create more databases or actually help businesses. It does the opposite. It limits business -- exactly the opposite of copyright's stated purpose. If we actually had an empirically driven copyright system, there wouldn't be database rights, because the evidence that they do more harm than good is quite clear. Anyone actually pushing for a database right is either ignorant of the evidence or is hoping to profit off such a right by limiting the market.

So it was of great concern to me when I saw a blog post from a lawyer suggesting that the US courts may be effectively allowing a database right on rating data. Beyond the troubling nature of the case, the lawyer who wrote that post also claimed that database holders might finally be "getting the protection they so desperately deserve, and need." Neither of those points is true. Database creators neither deserve nor need protection -- and the evidence on that is quite clear. The database industry in the US has been thriving without such protections, while places in Europe that do have such a right have seen significantly limited growth in those industries, with the data being a lot more expensive and a lot less useful. There is simply no compelling reason why such protectionism is needed unless one wants to simply ignore all empirical evidence.

Then, as you dig into the details of the actual case, you begin to realize what a poorly reasoned and dangerous decision this is, effectively allowing copyright to be expanded to data itself. Eric Goldman does a masterful job detailing the many, many, many problems with this decision. His description of the basics of the case make it clear how ridiculous the outcome is:

A Colorado judge has reached the remarkable conclusion that a hospital publicizing its star ratings and other recognition from a third party rating service in its marketing material might be committing copyright and trademark infringement. This is a little like saying that it could be copyright and trademark infringement for a law school to include its US News rankings in its marketing material or for a book publisher to issue a press release announcing its ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. CRAZY.

Goldman goes on to break down exactly where and how the judge went wrong on every single aspect of the ruling, touching on copyright, trademark and breach of contract. You should read his whole discussion, but here's the excerpt on copyright:

Let me start with a basic proposition. A single numerical value can never be copyrighted. Ever. I don't care what formula produced the value; I don't care how many digits the number has; I don't care what explanatory text is used to describe the value. I know cases occasionally have reached the absurd result that individual numerical values can be copyrighted, including one of my least favorite copyright cases of all time, the CDN v. Kapes Ninth Circuit case. They are wrong wrong WRONG.

Courts can reach this erroneous conclusion by treating a numerical output as a "compilation" of underlying data values. If you squint, you can almost see how this makes sense. The publisher chooses the underlying values to include, uses editorial judgment to build the algorithm crunching those values, and sometimes layers subjective judgments on top of the algorithm's output. However attractive this logic is, I think fundamentally misreads the copyright statute's definition of "compile." Under the copyright act, a compilation must represent a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged." When a single number distills but obscures the underlying numerical values, the single number cannot reflect a selection, coordination or arrangement of the underlying numbers. Thus, according to my argument, numerical values cannot be compiled unless the reader can see those underlying values directly.

In this case, the judge gets led astray by contemplating the idea/expression dichotomy as a spectrum with "discoveries" on one end and "expression" on the other. Because the ratings aren't discoveries, the court concludes they should qualify as expression. But the court's dichotomy is fatally incomplete. Instead, the inquiry is whether a single numerical value can represent an original work of authorship because it expresses an idea. A single numerical value cannot express an idea any more than a single word ever could.

Even if one reaches the incredible conclusion that a single numerical value is an original work of authorship, then surely it is preempted from copyright coverage by the merger doctrine, which says that if there are a limited number of ways to express a fact or idea, then the idea and expression merge into a single uncopyrightable whole. It seems like the star ratings in a 1-3-5 star rating system would, by definition, be subject to merger. Sorry to state the obvious, but how many ways are there to express that someone is rated one star??? Nevertheless, this court distorts the merger doctrine by saying the idea being expressed here is the rankings of healthcare providers. This is too high a level of conceptual generality. If every judge used this level of abstraction, the merger doctrine always would be a null set.

Goldman also explains why such a dreadful ruling, which seems to go against common sense and the law in nearly every way, may set a terrible precedent and get used in other cases:

If other courts follow this judge's "logic," the potential for mischief from cases like this is enormous. Think of every reputational system that spits out a numerical assessment of the subjects it evaluates. Now, assume each and every one of those numbers is copyrighted. Individual eBay feedback scores? Individual FICO scores? Individual Billboard rankings of songs and albums? All possibly copyrighted and requiring the initial publisher's consent to republish. Add in potential trademark claims, and the crazy-o-meter goes off the charts.

Ugh. This is a bad and dangerous ruling all around. And as you can see from our original link to the case, there are some other lawyers who think it's exactly on track. That's a bad, bad sign. Hopefully this ruling doesn't stand for very long.

Filed Under: copyright, database rights, numbers

Landgrab For Ownership Of Library Catalog Data

from the not-good dept

There's been an interesting (and somewhat troubling) behind the scenes fight going on concerning library catalog data over the past few months. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) is a nonprofit, made up of member libraries that basically tries to help facilitate access to information among libraries. That seems like a good thing. One of its offerings is WorldCat -- basically a big online catalog of library collections, so that it's easy for anyone to find books that are available at other libraries. This, obviously, seems quite useful, and many libraries agree and are a part of WorldCat. However, a month ago, OCLC announced new policies for WorldCat that effectively allowed OCLC to claim ownership over the records that any library put in its system -- and, upon doing so, limiting what libraries could do with that data (such as, say, giving it to competing cataloging services).

This has many in the library community quite reasonably worried, with specific questions about who should be allowed to "own" library records. As that last link shows, there are a number of different people and organizations involved in the creation of a basic library database record, and basically the only thing OCLC is doing is putting it online. It's difficult to see how they can then claim ownership of it.

While this may be new in the library space, this type of debate has raged for years in other arenas, and some of the findings from those earlier battles may be instructive. The issue has to do with the concept of "database rights." Normally, factual information is not subject to any sort of copyright or ownership rights for rather obvious reasons (how do you own a fact?). However, some believe that there should be separate "database rights" that allow ownership of the compilation of certain factual information. For the most part, the US has denied this right, while Europe has allowed it -- and the results have shown, quite clearly, that the US made the right decision. Ownership of database rights tends to damaging to business while allowing the data to remain free can help build booming industries.

In this case, the scenario is a little different, because OCLC isn't trying to claim a government backed "database right" over the content, but instead wants to achieve the same effective result via a unilateral change to its terms of service -- including a bit of viral licensing code that forces the "ownership" to travel with the data. OCLC doesn't really appear to have any legal authority here, but are trying to force it through by contract -- for which I'd say there's a decent chance it wouldn't hold up in court, though no one wants it to get that far. Between the unilateral change, the claiming of ownership of others' works (including public domain contributions from the Library of Congress) and the lack of database copyrights, you could probably make a good argument that the OCLC's policy change has no weight. Still, in the short term, a much better solution would be for OCLC to back off its silly ownership claim, recognize the power of open sharing of information, and focus on adding additional benefits and services for why libraries should want to work with OCLC over competitors, rather than trying to use slimy contract terms to block out competitors. And, of course, hopefully OCLC learns that pissing off your partners and customers by dumping draconian ownership claims on them is never a good business strategy.

Filed Under: catalog info, copyright, database rights, libraries, openness, ownership, worldcat
Companies: oclc