On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee approved HR 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act by a 16-7 vote. In 1999, a similar bill, the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, H.R. 354 (106th Congress) was introduced in committee, but never made it to the floor. Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) is the sponsor of this new bill and was the sponsor of the 1999 bill, as well.
This bill would share characteristics of Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament of of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, which grants compilers of databases a _sui generis right_against extraction. See Art. 7.1:
Member States shall provide for a right for the maker of a database which shows that there has been qualitatively and/or quantitatively a substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents to prevent extraction and/or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part, evaluated qualitatively and/or quantitatively, of the contents of that database.
News.com: Tech firms fail to squelch database bill
The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy. Its supporters say that such protection is necessary to stop rivals from extracting information from proprietary databases like Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis service instead of going through the far more expensive process of compiling it themselves.
Copyfight: The Coming of the Anti-Feist (whose clever title I stole abridged.)
Tech Law Advisor: Preemption and the Constitution be damned
US Chamber of Commerce urges House to oppose H.R. 3261 “Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act”
See also: Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
For a recent discussion of database extraction and copyright, see Assesment Technologies of WI, LLC v. WIREdata, Inc. (7th Cir. 2003), and Proprietary Database, Public Data and Copyright
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