"Imagine doing a Google search for a phone number, weather report or sports score. The results page would be filled with links to various sources of information. But what if someone typed in keywords and no results came back?

That's the scenario critics are painting of a new bill wending its way through Congress that would let certain companies own facts, and exact a fee to access them."

"The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill and the commerce committee is expected to review it on Thursday."

[ Jesus. I don't even know what to say to this. I don't see how existing copyright law fails to address this. My understanding is that a verbatim copy of large sections of a published work, even one which is essentially a collection of facts, is already a violation of copyright. If you aren't publishing your database as a work, then you aren't really in danger of infringement, right?

I want more details. If i write a really clever program that scrapes and aggregates court decisions and relevant case law straight from all the thousands of courts in the nation, indexes it and crosslinks it, and then i publish the result, does LexisNexis get to sue me? Under current law, i *think* the answer is no... would this change that? How can i be liable for creating my own independent collection of publicly available information? -k]

Wired News: Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine