RE: question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Patrik Stridvall]

> On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 21:53, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > The significant effort requirement is for EACH fact seen by ITSELF.
>
> This is certainly not the case in Australia, NZ and the UK.

So you can have protection on collections of truely trivial facts?
I severly doubt that. What legal purpose would that fulfill?

In Sweden AFAIK the intent of the protection is to protect the
investment of collecting facts that are not trivial to collect,
to ensure that somebody does (or might do)...

Protecting trivially collectable collections of fact would serve
no purpose that I can see...

question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Jonathan Wilson]

IANAL but here are some examples of things that I think are things that the 
law was intended to protect:
1.A real-estate database with information on many different houses.
2.The database at e.g. amazon.com containing details about a whole bunch of 
books
3.A database containing details of flights and prices for many different 
alrlines
and etc

Individually, this information is probobly not something that deserves 
protection. But collectivly on the other hand...

question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Troy Rollo]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 20:11, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> IANAL but here are some examples of things that I think are things that the
> law was intended to protect:
> 1.A real-estate database with information on many different houses.
> 2.The database at e.g. amazon.com containing details about a whole bunch of
> books
> 3.A database containing details of flights and prices for many different
> alrlines
> and etc

Yes. The original example used in the UK Parliament when the rule was 
introduced was of railway schedule publication.

question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Troy Rollo]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 18:44, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 21:53, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > > The significant effort requirement is for EACH fact seen by ITSELF.
> >
> > This is certainly not the case in Australia, NZ and the UK.
>
> So you can have protection on collections of truely trivial facts?
> I severly doubt that. What legal purpose would that fulfill?

You can doubt it all you like - it doesn't make it any less true. The relevant 
cases effectively protect the act of collection, so although it may be 
possible to go out and repeat the collection, you can't get away with copying 
just because its possible to produce the identical result by doing the same 
work.

See: Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Limited [2002] 
FCAFC 112 (15 May 2002)

<http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2002/112.html>

That case states the law in Australia and also goes over the UK precedents in 
excruciating detail. The High Court refused to grant leave to appeal, so the 
DtMS rule will remain law unless and until Parliament decides to change it.
> Protecting trivially collectable collections of fact would serve
> no purpose that I can see...

Here, if the collection as a whole requires trivial effort to collect, it's 
not protected. It's the aggregate effort that counts. The problem with the MS 
tables is that from what has been said the aggregate has involved a lot of 
effort over many years.