Thursday, February 26, 2004
Keep facts free
The latest EFF Action Alert makes me furious:
We're surrounded by free factual information, but there's a bill in Congress that would lock it all up. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (DCIMA, H.R. 3261) extends extremely broad copyright-like protections to collections of factual data - data like the price of a TV, the temperature in Arizona or information collected during scientific research. DCIMA would allow companies to sue anyone who interferes with their ability to profit from data that they collect. In other words, academic researchers, public libraries, Internet innovators and other database users would have to pay up if someone else claimed to have assembled the data first. This is not only unnecessary, it's bad policy.
This is outrageous. The IP land-grabbers aren't satisfied that the laws give them control over creative works or technical innovations for far longer than necessary to motivate creators. Now, they want to own publicly-accessible facts. Next they'll ask for the right to suck all the air out of the atmosphere and then charge us fees to access it.
Fill out the alert form to write your representative.
