--- The husband rarely gets his knickers in a twist over proposed
legislation. He'll get them in a twist about everything else, but
proposed legislation? Naaaaah. He knows the success ratio of most of
the really outrageous bills. But HR3261 (the GAO doesn't have the bill
up on its site, but go here and
enter in "HR3261" and it should pop up) has him concerned enough that
he sent out a mass emailing, asking people to write their
congresspeople to vote it down when it gets to the floor. He was tipped
off by this article in Wired News.
Art Brodsky, spokesman for public advocacy group Public Knowledge,
says the bill would let anyone drop a fact into a database or a
collection of materials and claim monopoly rights to it. This would
contradict the core principle of the Copyright Act, which states that
mere information and ideas cannot be protected works. Under the terms
of the broadly written bill, a public-health website could be deemed in
violation of the law for gathering a list of the latest health
headlines and providing links to them on its home page. Google would be
in violation for trolling media databases and providing stories on its
news page. An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts
contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the
copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike
copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author,
the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date. "The law
of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge,"
Brodsky said.
The law of unintended consequences indeed. Although, I doubt that Reed Elsevier cares
about unintended consequences---any unintended consequence of this bill
would be a good thing for them. (Ever tried to get into Lexis/Nexis or
Westlaw without coughing up the dough? Forget it. It won't happen.
They've got a Gilgamesh-sized lock on those databases.)
KEEP THE INFORMATION FREE FLOWING!Relatively interesting aside,
though: this bill has the potential to wreak havoc within the
blogosphere should it make it into law. I'm wondering why none of the
big dog bloggers have written anything about it. They'll devote endless
word counts to the doomed FMA, but this bill is sneaking under the
radar and they're ignoring it? Rather sad, don't you think?
Particularly for a medium that is supposed to be on the cutting edge of
every issue?