Copyright (was PDFs and tapeworm descriptions)

[Julian Humphries]

"Susan B. Farmer" wrote:
>
> >
> >But there is another aspect that one need to worry about now. That is The
> >DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act which is quite different from your standard
> >copyright law and applies to anything is "digital" format. So, as your WWW
> >site declares "In fact, the frightening reality is that almost everything on
> >the Net is protected by copyright law."  Also, remember EU copyright law is
> >different from US, and for us, the critical difference is that EU copyright
> >protect "databases," so the Bibliotheque Nationale de France could protect
> >their collection of pdf pages as a database.
>
> That's true.  But you can't copyright non-original work (the PDFs).  You
> can't copyright material that's already in the public domain (e.g., a list
> of species, or marriage records).  You can't copyright a blank form.
> In terms of genealogical works, you can only copyright the arrangement of
> the material, so you probably could copyright the database structure.
>
>

Unfortunately, most of those "can'ts" are no longer true, particularly
in Europe.  The simple creation of a database of previously unprotected
works grants new copyright protection to the database where those data
reside.

I quote from a recent issue of Science (Volume 293, Number 5537, Issue of 14 Sep
2001, pp. 2028-2031.):

"Now any person or firm that expends substantial resources in compiling data in
the European Union has a legal right to prevent anyone else from extracting or
reusing all or a substantial part (whatever that means) of the contents of the
database for 15 years (34). Additional expenditures in maintaining the database
will renew the term of protection, which arguably gives European data compilers
perpetual rights in the data in their databases (35)."

EU copyright issues are very complex, the WTO/WIPO agreements and
subsequent harmonization requirements have resulted in very strict copyright
rules that allow but don't require member countries to support fair use.
The library community in  Europe has been active in both local and EU level
discussions, but this is a fluid topic and I wouldn't make generalizations.

Similar database protection bills have been presented by our Congress several
times, and all fought successfully to date, but the current climate may allow
one of these to succeed.  Be diligent....

Julian Humphries
University of Texas