Comments on: More on HR 4077's carvings

By: John

John — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 23:48:08 +0000

I agree, If you can�t trace a fact that he uses to your database, you can�t claim ownership of it (even if it is in your database).

By: Rolo Timassie

Rolo Timassie — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 01:51:28 +0000

"Copyright law is the ONLY federal IP regulation that doesn�t have mandatory registration." The Lanham Act does not require registration of trademarks, not even, unlike the Copyright Act, as a prerequisite for an infringement suit.

By: Max Lybbert

Max Lybbert — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:05:41 +0000

Fuzzy, I think the proposed change is meant to make the fallback argument in Blizzard vs bnetd legally plausible (the argument was that bnetd illegally used "emoticons" from Blizzard's products, bnetd pointed out that those emoticons weren't registered as separate works, the court found bnetd guilty for other reasons).

In your example, if I take a picture of a public-domain work, I get copyright only on those aspects of my picture that are creative to me. The public domain work continues to be public domain.

So, a compilation of short stories may be copyrighted, but that copyright only extends to the protectible parts of the compilation -- layout, order, etc. A change to the law doesn't invalidate everything about the old law.

Regarding the database bill, I understand that only applies to copying the database or lare parts of it. If you can't trace a fact I use to your database, you can't claim ownership of it (even if it is in your database).

By: Fuzzy

Fuzzy — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 21:08:57 +0000

So, does this mean that if an author publishes a set of short stories and explicitly puts them into the public domain (or the author died 100 years ago) that a publisher can now put out a collection under copyright (previously allowed) and based on the Compilation copyright get a copyright on the individual (public domain) works, thus preventing any other compilation to include those short stories individually or collectively?

If not, what in the language of the bill will prevent this from happening?

If the database bill (allowing copyrights on collections of facts - like the phone book) passes, does this mean that a publisher would suddenly be able to copyright (not just trademark) individual facts?

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:46:22 +0000

Does this help at all? You can also try here (Library of Congress) with HR4077 as Bill Number.

By: Matt Krause

Matt Krause — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:24:35 +0000

Is there any easy way to see how the various Reps voted on this bill so I can curse out/thank mine as needed?