On Mon, 04 Nov 1996, Bruce Hayden wrote:
>
> I think you read Feist too literally. [snip]
>
> For example, my utility company keeps a database of the credit
> histories of its customers. There is absolutely no expression (on
> the part of the utility company) that I paid $153.75 last month. This
> is a fact, and as such is not protected by copyright.
Right. And the phone company has contributed that piece of information and might thus want to have ownership rights over it. But you contributed your name, address, credit info, etc. And it seems unlikely that the phone company could market this database without including information that came from other sources, such as its customers. So it really comes down to who owns what information and how do we determine who the rightful owner is. I would assume that part of the motivation in not copyrighting facts was to avoid this can of worms.
The essence of the argument, in my mind, is that facts do not spring whole cloth from the aether into our databases - most databases are compilations of data that have already existed in some form. So once there is a compilation of a set of data, will others be able independently compile their own database? Or will could they be held liable if their compilation closely resembles another?
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