Copying phone books

Posted Oct 6, 2005 7:25 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Copying phone books by man_ls
Parent article: The Authors' Guild and Google Print

ACtually, they are NOT "copyright". They are "databaseright" or whatever it's called. It's a similar, but distinct, concept of IP right.

The law places a value on the work carried out to create the compilation. So in practice, it works out just like copyright, but isn't. Just as two people could, theoretically, write the same book without knowing about the other, and copyright says "that's fine", so you have the same with databases - if my research produces the same results as yours, then there's no infringement, but if my research consists primarily of going through your database, then there is ...

Cheers,
Wol