On 10/7/97, Lynn Levine <lynnlevine[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> As any producer of databases can tell you, we have always operated
> on the belief that these products were protected by legislation,
> specifically copyright legislation. However, since the Feist
> decision, a significant number of us are finding that trickle-down
> decisions have diluted copyright protection (which was specifically
> intended by Congress) of factual compilations (and I am not talking
> about telephone book white pages) to the point that such protections
> are virtually nonexistent.
I'm afraid that I find this response to be rather -- well, non-responsive. If you are not producing the telephone book white pages, then you still have all the copyright protection that you ever had. Copyright clearly covers the original selection and arrangement of compilations, including databases -- that *is* what Congress intended, and I am unaware of any court decision holding otherwise.
What is not protected is the unoriginal compilation of facts or public domain materials (such as judicial opinions). The Feist decision simply confirmed what had been painfully obvious for some time: that an uncopyrightable work is not magically transformed into a copyrightable one by virtue of the effort that went into producing it.
> The database protection legislation we propose is simply
> a means of closing a widening gap in the law.
I quite agree that the proposed legislation is a transparent attempt to get from the legislature what could not be gotten from the courts. Economists have a term for this; they call it "rent-seeking." I certainly hope that Ms. Tyson will also favor us with a "strong economic rationale" for Reed Elsevier's and Thompson's rent-seeking activity, especially since such activity is generally considered a waste of social resources.
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