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Naive commentsNaive commentsPosted Jan 29, 2004 11:30 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415)Parent article: HR 3261 and the ownership of facts Some comments here are calling LWNs comments alarmist. These posters are being incredibly naive.... The whole point of this bill is not to "protect" any particular database. It is to allow the incumbents in information based markets ( map dbs, law dbs , genetic dbs) to maintain a a monopoly over those markets. Lets say there is, in the next few years, a project to generate really Free accurate maps of the world. The project gets started, and all the incumbents get together and sue under this act. How on earth can the project ever hope to prove they did not reproduce the information from existing maps? How can anybody compiling FACTS ever hope to prove that they compiled them independently, and didn't copy from another database covering the same facts? Expect to see FreeDB and MusicBrainz shut down by Gracenote when this passes.
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Naive comments Posted Jan 29, 2004 14:45 UTC (Thu) by jharding (guest, #1102) [Link] Lets say there is, in the next few years, a project to generate really Free accurate maps of the world. The project gets started, and all the incumbents get together and sue under this act. How on earth can the project ever hope to prove they did not reproduce the information from existing maps? How can anybody compiling FACTS ever hope to prove that they compiled them independently, and didn't copy from another database covering the same facts? I have not read the entire PDF, but I assume that the burden of the proof has to be on the side of the owners of the allegedly copied database. In Chile for example (with a legal system and laws in this respect similar to Europe's), databases are protected and so are telephone books. In one case regarding the copying of such a telephone book the company who made the original compilation had to prove that the second company copied this compilation. It did so by showing that it had the information gathered long before the second company and that the same typos that occured in one compilation also appeared in the second, proving that both compilations must have had the same source. So if the burden of the proof is on part of the party claiming to own a database that has been copied by another party, I completely agree that the comments are somewhat alarmistic.
but who pays... Posted Jan 29, 2004 19:17 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] Yes, but under the US legal system the person/company being sued has to pay their own bills, so fishing expeditions (threatening to sue in order to get a out-of-court settlement) are routine. In Chile, I expect the loser had to pay the legal bills, meaning that this type of shake down doesn't happen nearly so often.
but who pays... Posted Jan 29, 2004 22:16 UTC (Thu) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link] So you are really saying that the US legal system is flawed *in general* and that even a good law can be abused by the rich. I'd have to say I agree. But from that does not follow, that this law is bad, unless you propose that the US in its current state would be better off without any laws at all.henrik
US going lawless? Posted Feb 6, 2004 0:17 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] There's a case to be made for this.In fact it's being made now at the western end of Cuba...
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