I'm going to have more to say about data, databases, and intellectual property rights in the coming months. This longish post provides a basic primer on how U.S. copyright law applies to databases....
[A.1] a. Originality
...As a practical matter, this originality standard prevents copyright from applying to complete databases – i.e. those that list all instances of a particular phenomenon – that are arranged in an unoriginal manner, such as alphabetically or by numeric value. However, courts have held that incomplete databases that reflect original selection and arrangement of data, such as a guide to the “best” restaurants in a city, are copyrightable in their selection and arrangement. Such a copyright would prohibit another from copying and posting such a guide on the Internet without permission. However, because the copyright would be limited to that particular selection and arrangement of restaurants, a user could use such a database as a reference for creating a different selection and arrangement of restaurants without violating the copyright owner’s copyright.
Copyright is also limited by the merger doctrine, which appears in many database disputes. If there are only a small set of practical choices for expressing an idea, the law holds that the idea and expression merge and the result is that there is no legal liability for using the expression.
Under these principles, metadata is copyrightable only if it reflects an author’s original expression. For example, a collection of simple bibliographic metadata with fields named “author,” “title,” “date of publication,” would not be sufficiently original to be copyrightable. More complex selections and arrangements may cross the line of originality. Finally, to the extent that software is used in a databases, software is protectable as a “literary work.” A discussion of copyright in executable code is beyond the scope of this entry....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/21/2009 11:58:00 AM.
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.
