Re: Can you own the number 10.5% ?

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Colin Seeger <seeger[_at_]ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 2/1/99, John R. Levine <johnl[_at_]iecc.com> wrote:
> >
> > A friend of mine recently wrote a book about personal financial
> > software. He mentioned in passing that the long term return on stocks
> > is 10.5%, a number that he'd read in a newsletter from Vanguard. That
> > number is widely cited in the press -- in a few minutes I found it on
> > the web in an article in the Detroit News and a feature piece on family
> > finance on Money Magazine's web site, with no citation of a source in
> > either case.
> >
> > Shortly after the book came out, his publisher received a letter from
> > Ibbotson Associates, who he'd never heard of until that point, saying
> > that the 10.5% number was theirs since they were the only people doing
> > long-term analysis of market returns, that was a number they'd
> > calculated, and he'd misappropriated their proprietary number. I don't
> > know if they demanded a specific remedy or not.
> >
> > It may well be the case that Ibbotson was the original source of the
> > number, but I can't see how they have any claim on it. They can't
> > copyright it since it's a fact, and it's well established that you
> > can't copyright facts. It's not a trade secret, since it's not
> > secret, it's published all over the place.
> >
> > Am I missing something here?
> >
> > PS: The obvious solution of getting a free or cheap license to make
> > Ibbotson go away doesn't seem to be available, since they charge you
> > $150 just to consider an application, before any licensing fee.
>
> Dear John,
>
> You might have a look at the Australian High Court Decision regarding
> Autocad v Dyson. Sorry I don't have a citation but it was about 1995.
> There is a very detailed (but wrong!) analysis of number strings and
> software using number sequences. The case is the last word here but
> most experts consider that the Court misunderstood the issues.

The value of Autocad v Dyason as a precedent within Australia is dodgy enough. I doubt whether anyone who isn't forced to use it as a precedent would ever consider it. If the judgment itself isn't sufficient evidence of this, the decision also is at divergence with the EU directive on reverse engineering and subsequent US case law re reverse engineering.

BTW it was not the last word. The full HC heard an application to rehear the case (which was rejected by the majority) but in a dissenting opinion, the CJ admitted that the first decision was incorrectly decided on the facts, and other judges came pretty close to a similar admission.

You can find full judgments for both cases on http://www.austlii.edu.au/

-- 
| Tim Arnold-Moore, Ph.D., LL.B., B.Sc. (Hons)
| Postal address:  Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT
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