• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:my db (Score:5, Funny) by AntiOrganic (650691) on Monday December 01, @11:25PM (#7606337) (http://www.madtasty.com/)

This comment is a ridiculous overexaggeration of the point. Ownership of the sky, sun and moon has been traced back to a group of individuals from an area of Scandinavia now known as Norway, circa 700 A.D., when they filed an international accord stating that Valkyries under their dominion had claimed the sky in their name. Interestingly enough, they did not claim ownership of any stars or planets, so it will be interesting to look back through the archives and see who did. To this day, all countries utilizing airborne vehicles flying in excess of 20,000 feet must pay royalties to Norway for the commercial use of their property.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

Too bad guys (greedy corps and stupid politians) they beat you too it!


No mater where you go, there you are...about a block from Taco Bell.

• 4 replies beneath your current threshold.

• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

Wrong. It limits the rights of everyone, period. Why do people so consistently miss the fact that less government involvement neatly solves problems like these?

Re:Who's really looses out here? (Score:4, Insightful) by DarkSarin (651985) on Monday December 01, @10:28PM (#7605901) (http://ben.realisticweb.com/)

I have to agree here, and this is one of the areas that Libertarians have it right-and both of the other parties are so far off base it is frightening. BOTH Dems and Reps are for big brother, and that is what scares me. Laws like this are pathetic, and should be axed before they even get on the books. My personal policy is that if you are voting, look up who votes for laws of this and DON'T support them. This is the ONLY way that we Americans will be able to maintain a reasonably free society--by removing those politicians who repeatedly support government intervention in areas that don't need it (which by the way is the vast majority of our lives). I will probably vote Libertarian in the next election. The only thing that turns me off is the Libertarian polits whose main platform is the legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug. This platform, although popular in certain subcultures, scares the daylights out of so many people that it will never be a winning platform. Personally, I would rather see an emphasis placed on deregulation of many things, lowered (or eliminated) taxes, and increased fiscal responsibility. This of course means reducing and /or cutting certain programs, but many of these should be removed from the gov't's hands in any case. As for ownership of data, it is my personal opinion that ANY data belongs to the person or entity which it describes. Therefore, if a company has data which describes me, I should be considered the sole OWNER, and they are permitted to use such data only insofar as I deem it permissable. This gets tricky, such as in the case of surveys, but essentially, if data is not traceable to a particular individual (as should be the case in surveys), then it belongs to the entity that generated such data--until such a time as they make it public. Once data is aired to the public as a fact (as in a news report, or whatnot), it should now be considered public domain, and freely usable by any who are interested. This does not mean that one should not cite sources, or that we should be able to access any database, but that we should have the opportunity to use information that is available. (As a note, I just took a Loritab and a Skelaxin(?sp), so if this doesn't make any sense or is totally crazy, just ignore me--it's the medicine talking.) ...the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. ~J.D. Salinger

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Who's really looses out here? (Score:4, Interesting) by SnatMandu (15204) on Tuesday December 02, @03:11AM (#7607231) (http://www.electricmindcontrol.net/)

I will probably vote Libertarian in the next election. The only thing that turns me off is the Libertarian polits whose main platform is the legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug. This platform, although popular in certain subcultures, scares the daylights out of so many people that it will never be a winning platform. I know it's offtopic (mods, hammer away), but SO MANY PEOPLE smoke marijuana (and so many people use other drugs (many illegal) too), that it really ought not be a losing platform. The liberals are already for decriminalization, mostly; the conservatives ought to give it whirl based on the tax savings alone. listen to psychedelic everything music [electricmindcontrol.net], do it now

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 6 replies beneath your current threshold.

• 4 replies beneath your current threshold.

99% of bills introduced into Congress are quiet ( unless you watch C-SPAN. No where in the Constitution does it say that a loud proclamation of all bills must be made.

--
New Home -- State Parks [onlinehome.us]

• 4 replies beneath your current threshold.

SEC. 4. PERMITTED ACTS.

            (a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce.

            (b) ACTS OF MAKING AVAILABLE IN COMMERCE BY NONPROFIT EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC, OR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS- The making available in commerce of a substantial part of a database by a nonprofit educational, scientific, and research institution, including an employee or agent of such institution acting within the scope of such employment or agency, for nonprofit educational, scientific, and research purposes shall not be prohibited by section 3 if the court determines that the making available in commerce of the information in the database is reasonable under the circumstances, taking into consideration the customary practices associated with such uses of such database by nonprofit educational, scientific, or research institutions and other factors that the court determines relevant.

            (c) HYPERLINKING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict the act of hyperlinking of one online location to another or the providing of a reference or pointer (including such reference or pointer in a directory or index) to a database.

            (d) NEWS REPORTING- Nothing in this Act shall restrict any person from making available in commerce information for the primary purpose of news reporting, including news and sports gathering, dissemination, and comment, unless the information is time sensitive and has been gathered by a news reporting entity, and making available in commerce the information is part of a consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct competition.

Open them eyes... (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, @10:11PM (#7605782)

You need to read the case about the building codes. I suggest you go to the guy's site where he tried to publish the building codes, and the case went all the way to SCOTUS. Last time I checked (few months ago) the codes still weren't published even though he won. I've tried getting the codes myself, for my state. They're over $70. Think about it for a minute. These aren't just a collection of facts. These codes are the LAW. So I have to pay a private company to find out what the law is. What did the guy do? After searching through various retail locations and coming up empty, he decided to publish THE LAW of building codes for the particular town he was interested in, and he was taken to court by a private company. I thought I could search my state/city's web site to find out what the codes were, but thanks to the private company, virtually all states/cities/towns in the US "adopt by reference", and don't publish what the actual codes are, therefore you are forced to pay if you want to know what the law is. To make it simple, codes are necessarily published in a certain order, in a certain format. Changing the format wouldn't work. So if the private company publishes a book of codes (they do), you can't copy the book and put it on a web site, according to the proposed law. If the company also publishes the codes online, you can't do the same. So you'll go to their site you say? They don't publish all the codes. And the ones they do publish, you have to go through multiple directory trees, or they make it exceedingly and annoyingly difficult to get more than one or two sub sections at a time. If you are familiar with building codes, this is a non-starter. The other option is 1. going to the library (it's a reference book, you can't take it out. or 2. going to the county clerk (a major pita in most cities, and it's a reference, you can't take it home). Can you see it now?

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Open them eyes... (Score:5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, @10:50PM (#7606051)

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're aggravated because your city/county/state has building codes (and other laws) and they're being a bunch of slack bastards about publishing them in an easily used format. There are dead tree versions and unhelpful govt workers, but these are annoying to deal with. You are misunderstanding, and that's what's annoying. The government entities, whether they are state, city, or town, are NOT publishing period. They have INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE the codes (laws), and they have purchased for the clerk (because the clerk is in the court) one copy for the clerk's use. Because everything that is in the clerk's office that is a law can be read by the public during certain business hours, the public can access if the clerk is not busy, if it isn't a lunch hour, if you can take time off during a work day... These are laws. Not a collection of facts like baseball statistics. Now, some other company was started by someone who also noticed what a pain in the ass it was to deal with these codes and figured people might pay to be able to access them in an easy-to-use format. Problem is that they charge more than you want to pay. More wrong. One organization put together the code. They make their money by selling the code to the trades that are forced to buy from their monopoly if they want to work. Forced to buy the law. Are you understanding this? Forced to buy the law. Not baseball statistics. Therefore, unless I'm reading you wrong, you're mad that you can't take their data and republish it. Since that's all that I can see is prohibited; you're still free to hassle that clerk until they cough up the codes and then publish THAT. In fact, the only way you can get in trouble is if you republish a lot of this data and can't prove you got it from anything else except the commercial database. Even more wrong. The only place you can get it is from buying their book, from the clerk (you can't take it out, you can't sit there and hand copy, you can't bring your own photocopy machine to the clerk's office) or from the library (sit there and copy, what by hand? Copy machine? Who's, yours? Theirs? How much paper/toner will they allow you? How much time?) And those are the three places, according to facts as came out in the court cases over the building codes case. Regardless of whether, and as it was listed in the case, you collected the code (LAWS) from buying the book, from the clerk, from the library, YOU STILL CAN'T PUBLISH YOUR OWN BOOK, OR ON THE INTERNET. WHETHER FOR PROFIT, OR NOT. The guy won the case, now the National Electrical organization, and joined by the Building Code organization are pushing this bill to overturn that case. So, while I can sympathize with your dilemna, you might direct your anger more towards the useless govt workers who aren't publishing the codes in a useful manner than the DB company that spent a lot of time trying to make them more usable (if more costly). As stated earlier, it isn't a government problem of not publishing codes in a useful manner. And it isn't a database company spending a lot of time trying to make them more usable. It is a private organization that is putting together, and publishing the codes (LAWS) themselves, and restricting anyone else from listing those codes (LAWS), and threatening/taking to court anyone who tries (the National Electrical Code Assocation was the case, the Building Codes association joined, and the National Fire Protection Association has threatened others). So get your facts straight.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:I don't see what's wrong here (Score:5, Insightful) by chezmarshall (694493) on Monday December 01, @10:39PM (#7605969) (http://www.chezmarshall.com/)

What's wrong here is that it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor. Who can afford to litigate against a Fortune 500 company whether his database is or is not misappropriated from theirs? How can you ever establish that you independently generated your database? When ownership of fact can be the basis of a civil suit, the individual is shut out. Like software patents, the big corporations will own portfolios of databases that they will cross-license to each other while they collectively collude to keep everyone else out. When I see that the phone company and building-code associations are going out of business because bad guys have misappropriated their "databases," it may be time for such a law. Until then, what's the rush? I wish legislators would include at least a token discussion on exactly what the problem for which they're providing a "solution." Whose databases are currently being misappropriated?

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

what's wrong here (Score:5, Insightful) by scoove (71173) on Monday December 01, @11:06PM (#7606189)

it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor It's much more than that. Often, "big corporations" aren't the licensees of the data; smaller entities are (such as is the case in many state data distribution contracts, e.g. DMV databases which are auctioned off like radio spectrum in an irresponsible manner). Subsequently, the "evil big corporation" matter is a red herring. We need to keep the eye on the fundamental - the government's aspiration to implement a Stationer's register [bartleby.com] system that requires the authority of the crown in order to access public information. Imagine the absolute power politicians will have in defining who can and cannot see public records. Per the original post's critique link: H.R. 3261 ...would create a new federal property right in online and offline databases (collections of information), and give the federal courts power to police the use of information in databases. This is much more than a theft of public information (again, mirroring the FCC's approach to spectrum auctions). Much of this government information is necessary for ensuring compliance. Imagine, for instance, if driving laws were maintained in a Federal database, but access to that database required a $25,000 annual fee. Failure to have access to this database would result in recurring noncompliance; e.g. making normal citizens recurring lawbreakers. Certainly many politicians aspire to extend a political system that ensures all citizens are lawbreakers and subsequently dependents upon the system. Concealing public information which is necessary for legal compliance is a terrible move towards tyranny. H.R. 3261 would allow federal courts to impose stiff penalties if someone uses information from a database that a corporation claims to own. Almost sounds like it was written by Kafka: "I'm sorry sir, but to divulge what crime you have been charged with, absent proper licensing and permitting of your access to the Federal crimes database, would be a crime of itself. Certainly you wouldn't wish to compound matters, would you?" Incidentally, I see that Rep. Billy Tauzin [house.gov], known as the loyal Representative from BellSouth [newnetworks.com], is a cosponsor of this bill. Good rule of thumb: if Billy's involved, it's probably not on the level. *scoove*

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

You folks are barking up the wrong tree (Score:4, Insightful) by Dalcius (587481) <duckmanins.hotmail@com> on Tuesday December 02, @01:14AM (#7606839)

"What's wrong here is that it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor. Who can afford to litigate against a Fortune 500 company whether his database is or is not misappropriated from theirs?" What follows is a general rant about "the system": Don't blame the law (unless you think it's wrong in and of itself, of course). Don't blame the lawyers, they're just mouthpeices: everyone (even the bad guys) needs a voice in a civil society. Blame the elected representatives who pass bad legislation which screws up the system. Blame the elected judges who hear ridiculous cases and who let bad legislation pass which screws up the system. Blame the citizens making up juries who make some of these stupid court decisions. See where this is going? Government (and economics, for that matter) is just a way of controlling power. No matter which party you belong to, it doesn't get any more basic than this. If you don't play the game, the folks who make the rules (your fellow citizens) will fuck you over. Democracy, capitalism, whatever -- NONE of it works if the people sit around and let a minority run the show. Personally, I'm of the opinion that less government is a good thing: I feel that sane courts and capitalism are more effective than legislature (I trust my vote more among 200,000 corporations than than I do 2,000 politicians). I think less government could solve problems like this, but it will never happen unless lots of folks like me vote. The same goes for you and what you believe. Welcome to the rest of your life. Put your hands on the wheel. ~Dalcius Take two very large grains of salt and call me in the morning.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 4 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:I don't see what's wrong here (Score:5, Interesting) by Alsee (515537) on Monday December 01, @11:13PM (#7606249) (http://slashdot.org/)

Welcome to my database of Elements: Hydrogen: Atomic weight 1.00794 Helium: Atomic weight 4.002602 Lithium: Atomic weight 6.941 Beryllium: Atomic weight 9.012182 Boron: Atomic weight 10.811 Carbon: Atomic weight 12.0107 Nitrogen: Atomic weight 14.0067 Oxygen: Atomic weight 15.9994 I spent nearly an hour researching sources for all one hundred and thirteen items in that database! Do you know it took me almost eight minutes to find a source for the atomic weight for Darmstadtium alone? Element 110, Darmstadtium, atomic weight 281! I invested TIME and WORK into building my database! I'm trying to SELL these facts! I have a RIGHT to make money selling these facts! Now, with this law I can finally sue anyone who tries to infringe my god-given right to make a profit! These are MY facts! I OWN them! Anyone who copies these facts is a THIEF! That's right! Bob over there STOLE the FACT that Oxygen has an atomic weight of 15.9994! He STOLE it from me! And don't you dare try to STEAL the speed of light out of my database! I own that too, and I'm damn well going to make money selling it! [/sarcasm] Note that the mere fact that I attempt to sell this info automatically qualifies it as a "commercial database". I could have a database with the facts that 'M' is the 13th letter of the alphabet and 'N' is the 14th letter. That's a "commercial database" too, if I say it is. The Supreme Court ruled that you cannot copyright facts, and with damn good reason. Congress is forbidden from granting copyright protection to databases of facts so they are making an end-run around the Supreme Court. They are inventing some new "right" out of thin air. A right to own facts. It's a dumb idea. You cannot "own" the speed of light. You cannot "own" the height of Mt. Everest. You cannot "own" the fact that Bob Miller lives at 8192 Binary Lane. You cannot "own" the fact that Bob Miller is 5-foot-4. You cannot "own" the fact that Bob Miller's phone number is (429)496-7296. That last item - Bob Miller's phone number - is particularly signifigant. This whole issue started with a battle over the PHONE BOOK. The Supreme court ruled that the listings of people's phone numbers in the phone book can't be protected and can't be owned by the company publishing the phone book. This new law is an attempt to "fix" that problem. It grants the phone book publisher ownership over the fact that Bob Miller's phone number is (429)496-7296. As for the exemptions you list, yeah, the law would devestating with out them. But it's not about what is permitted, it's about what is prohibited. The law prohibits the "misappropriation of facts". You can't "misappropriate" a fact. - - -Of course /. stories are slanted. If it wasn't slanted it'd be |.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
• 9 replies beneath your current threshold.

Yea! Thank God they thought of the poor telemarketers!

Re:Question.... (Score:5, Interesting) by drinkypoo (153816) <drink&hyperlogos,org> on Monday December 01, @09:59PM (#7605711) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday November 21, @04:31PM)

I've spent all my life generating, gathering, and/or maintaining every fact about it; it has taken all my money, and all my time. -- BZBOYZ.com is a fradulent advertiser [slashdot.org]

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:Sigh... (Score:4, Insightful) by schon (31600) on Monday December 01, @11:13PM (#7606252) (http://slashdot.org/)

The free-market system depends on scarcity of information. No, it doesn't. The free-market system depends on scarcity of material. That material may be 'intellectual property', or it may be physical goods. It's perfetcly possible to have a free market without scarcity of information. "Once in the enlightenment of vivid concoction I saw God."

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:4, Interesting) by beacher (82033) on Monday December 01, @10:26PM (#7605888) (http://warez.texas.net/)

Okay now here's a riddle - Let's say that Microsoft comes out with Longhorn and WinFS [com.com]. My files are now in a database. Can they take even the smallest form of data out (ie a subset as per the definitions) without violating this law? Neat

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

C code is no more a set of facts than poetry is a set of facts. C does more than generate hashes, for one thing (at least the Linux code does more than that, else there'd be a lot of coders who've wasted a lot of time). Code is a set of instructions, which are together part of a process. It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book. A collection of, say, reserved names in Java may be merely a collection of facts; an original creation is not. It's also inventive, in the patentable sense (`look-and-feel' patents, of course, raise some big controversy). But it's not simply a collection of facts.

• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

Read the rest of this comment...

Re:When I remember Poland... (Score:5, Interesting) by js7a (579872) * <[gro.kivob] [ta] [semaj]> on Tuesday December 02, @01:33AM (#7606901) (http://www.bovik.org./ | Last Journal: Thursday November 13, @08:55PM)

it wasn't freedom that people fought for. It was the shiny shop shelves bending under weight of wares, it was fast cars, big luxury houses that most of the people who fought thought they would have. Their mistake as to the character of capitalism appeared shortly after, and homeless, redundant, criminals came as a shock. Nobody who came from the US with a bag of dollars ever mentioned them. Nobody mentioned that people may die because they can't aford medicine; they can freeze to death because real estate agents get hold of empty houses and offer them for sale for the rich. Nobody thought they would burn alive because of home-made coal heating, because they can't afford gas for central heating. Some people earned lots. Some lost all. Not to mention most of state-funded institutions. Nowadays the best teenagers can do is to go and rob someone, watch TV, and drink beer. Build your own RC car? How? Tools! Parts! Knowledge! Cost! Completely beyond reach. Most of Eastern Europe fell from inefficient communism into brutal capitalism because of all the money to be made (for the very few rich), when what they needed was the efficient socialism of, e.g., Sweden. In Sweden, most people don't pay taxes, which are income based in two brackets -- the bottom bracket pays 0%, and the upper bracket, which begins at 10% above the mean wage earned amounts to a tax of 57% of the portion of income above that level. As you might imagine, Sweden's system compresses almost everyone into the middle class while still allowing for plenty of incentive. This has resulted in an economy that looks perfect from the perspective of a capitalist or communist nation, with ultra-low unemployment, inflation, national debt, poverty, and infant mortality, and ultra-high longevity, per-capita spending power, and literacy. They have a thriving economy at all sizes of business, from sole-proprietorships to multinationals (e.g., Ikea, Volvo, Ericsson.) Sweden frequently ranks as the #1 place in the world to live on aggregate quality-of-life rankings. I don't understand why so many of the post-communist countries aren't following Sweden's lead. Howard Dean for President [deanforamerica.com] until 2013

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Get your facts straight... (Score:4, Informative) by danro (544913) on Tuesday December 02, @04:33AM (#7607435) (http://slashdot.org/)

I'm swedish, and I like living here, but get your facts straight! Living here is good, that is true, but it is not the utopia you make it out to be. You are describing Sweden in the 70's, not in the 00's. (Being completely intact after WWII gave us a good head start...) After a slight crisis in the 90's national debt is up, unemployment is up a bit, and we are over all more on par with other western european countries. "First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 6 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:5, Insightful) by Afty0r (263037) on Tuesday December 02, @05:54AM (#7607618) (http://slashdot.org/)

From the contents of your post, I see you are aware that if we were to just release software into the public domain, modifications could then legally become propietary. So instead we it release under the GPL which prevents that from happening. But if there was no legal basis for restricting software - if all software was pubic domain, then there would be no need for the GPL. Copyleft is only necisarry because of the existence of copyright. If software was not copyrighted, the world of software development would be free to take and use any code they wanted from anywhere, at any time, and do anything with it they pleased. This would lead to the distribution of much of what is now "free" software, but in compiled form, sold only after being compiled with a compiler which would completely obfuscate the resulting executable making it exceedingly hard to reverse engineer/decompile the code. Essentially, we would live in a world where the highest paid engineers were those who know how to obfuscate well. "Free" software wouldn't gain anything, and indeed may be eclipsed by closed source versions of software which have proprietary modifications to make them more attractive. Unlike todays situation where closed source companies cannot make effective business use of GPLd (or similar) code, we would enter into an era of unparalleled code theft and plagiarism. Legal, of course. What I think the FSF wants to get to, is a point where copyright *does not apply* to software, and in addition, it becomes a legal requirement to distribute copies of source code with all software. In return for the legal protection of copyright, developers should have to distribute their source code - this I do not argue with at all - but copyright (or copyleft) itself will still be required to keep free software free. Note, that I am primarily a closed source user, but would prefer copyrighted software with mandated source code distribution.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

• 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
• 1 reply beneath your current threshold.