A bill moving through Congress would allow corporations to protect databases of public facts as if they were copyrighted works.
Commercial database companies say they invest millions of dollars in collecting, editing and organizing information for their customers, but don't have adequate protection to prevent someone from stealing the information to compete with them. They say the public will lose access to information if companies are deterred from building databases because of theft.Of course a wholesale ripoff of, say, Westlaw's database would be plain theft, and illegal under current legislation. What's new would be the extension of limitless copyright-like protection to a non-creative collection of mundane facts, like census information, stock prices, or weather statistics. As with the DMCA, this would grant relatively few corporations the ability to charge whatever fee they wanted for access to data (often collected at the public expense), which would have a stifling effect on innovation and academic research.
