I got drawn into a debate about copyrights and factual data this week that felt like it merited its own blog post....
So, the whole thing started when Jon Philips, a dear friend and running-dog creative commoner, posted that we need to have a slogan-level campaign about data. He suggested "data is not copyrightable" and the comments started to fly. Some jumped in and said it was an empty slogan. Being a pedantic wonk, I jumped in to point out that this was a technically correct and truthful statement. And then it got interesting, at least, from my perspective.
We got embroiled in the weeds of the issue - the definitions of data, and importance of compilation and selection and arrangement, the funky international regimes around data protection, and so forth. I'm going to try to untangle them a little bit here....
[The Feist case] was good news for telephone book competition. It's fantastic news for science. It means that at least in the US, there is a right granted to us as users to extract, republish, integrate, federate, query, mash, mix, fold, spindle, and mutilate data to our own ends. It is an essential legal component of the emerging web of data. If copyrights traveled with either an individual datum or a data set, we'd have attribution stacking problems that make the miserable 27 pages of illegible wikipedia attribution look like a walk in the park, and that's just for today. In 30 years, which is less than halfway towards the end of a copyright whose death-clock began ticking today, it'd be a nightmare.
So "Data isn't copyrightable" might be a poor slogan. But it's an essential truth. It sits at the basis of a lot of really important legal aspects around data. If data were copyrightable it might be easier to understand, but it'd be a lot worse to use.
This creates what a lot of folks seem to think is an incentive problem. How can we create incentives for people to create data collections if there's no protection? I'll come back to this in another post....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/26/2009 12:52:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
