[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Who owns my sword?

[ceo]

Tamzen Cannoy wrote:
> At 5:22 PM +0000 9/11/03, Matt Mihaly wrote,

>> Well, as far as I am aware (and I am not a lawyer), the law would
>> not recognize a collection of database entries as having any
>> legal right whatsoever. Without legal right there is no legal
>> ownership. Companies can own things. Individuals can own
>> things. I'm pretty sure an avatar or the copy of Word sitting on
>> my harddrive cannot, at least in the eyes of the law.

> The EU is proposing just such copyrights for databases and the US
> is also considering it.

>  http://www.mbc.com/db30/cgi-bin/pubs/TPA-European_Commission.pdf

>  http://www.avnonline.com/issues/200309/newsarchive/news_090503_10.shtml

Yikes, for a minute there you had me worried. But I think you've
misunderstood. The links you quote are for something that's been UK
law for many many years (and it's a little worrying that this has
not previously been reflected in the US).

Essentially, when a person or organization collates and organizes
(IIRC under the UK law, a necessary step is an "indexing" process)
information, they in effect are creating a form of property - it is
their hard work that made the decisions of what should be included,
where it should be included, how it should be indexed. Since this is
effectively a creative process, there is some logic in it being
copyright-protected.

Previously, the law has been used for everything from tipsters'
notes (the hand-written databases made by gamblers who compiled
historical data on the performance of different horses in order to
help predict future performance - IIRC the horse-racing
organizations tried to sue them, claiming they fundamentally "owned"
the data since they were the original publisher of each individual
item of data. The courts ruled that they owned the raw data, but the
indexing of that data into a database which could provide entirely
new, derivative data, constituted a new, copyrightable, work. Hence
the original publishers had no right of ownership over the database)
to protecting customer records against wholesale "customer theft" by
employees who get poached to join a rival company, and try to take
the customers with them.

But what Matt's talking about is whether "data in a database" is a
"legal entity" or not. That is unrelated to whether a database is a
copyrightable work. The former is like a person - it has rights of
it's own, and can own things, and can be help responsible/sued for
it's actions, etc. The latter is merely an item of (intellectual)
property.

IANAL.

Adam M
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