Copyright of facts is upon us! ARRGH!

HOLY FRIGGIN' CRAP!!! Those are the first words that came out of my mouth when I read the following from a Declan piece ("Tech firms fail to squelch database bill") over at C|Net. Did I metion that "HR 3261 is bad news..."?

It's like a copyright-version of the Chicken Little story where the sky was falling.

Tech firms fail to squelch database bill
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer [a/k/a the baddest-ass tech reporter :) -jlh], CNET News.com

A congressional panel on Wednesday approved a proposal to curb database copying, ignoring the objections of technology companies that launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to kill the proposal.

By a 16-7 vote, the House Judiciary committee approved an intellectual property bill that had been opposed by Amazon.com, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Yahoo and some Internet service provider associations.

The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy. Its supporters say that such protection is necessary to stop rivals from extracting information from proprietary databases like Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis service instead of going through the far more expensive process of compiling it themselves.

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Posted by joebeone at Enero 21, 2004 10:32 PM