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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

Actually, such database laws are rare. The US and Canada don't have one. See Feist v. Rural Telephone for an example of databases getting scraped & the scraper winning in court.

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Actually, the US does have one.

The World Copyright Treaty of the WIPO, which the US also signed, enforces in Article 5 that every member country has to have a database law of this kind.

    ________________________

> Article 5: Compilations of Data (Databases)

> Compilations of data or other material, in any form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations, are protected as such. This protection does not extend to the data or the material itself and is without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material contained in the compilation.

http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/text.jsp?file_id=295...

> United States of America

> Signature: April 12, 1997

> Ratification: September 14, 1999

> In Force: March 6, 2002

    ________________________

In fact, this fucking treaty is the only reason so many countries even have that at all – the EU didn’t have any Database Law before it was created, and the US threatened (as always) to boycott any country not signing.

To be clear, this wasn't a scraper in the networked computer sense. It's actually a perfect example of how meatspace safeguards don't translate because law is not equipped to handle the nature of cyberspace.

I don't see how that's true at all. Running a meatspace telephone book through a sheet-fed scanner and OCR isn't wildly different from scraping a website.

It's different because you don't contact another party's server to do it. The CFAA makes it illegal to "exceed authorized access" to networked computers. "Authorized access" is whatever the server's owner says it is. That's why the copyright status of factual accumulations isn't a protection for internet scraping.

If Feist v. Rural occurred now and Rural, like most companies, kept their information in a database online, Feist would lose not for copyright infringement, but for exceeding authorized access to Rural's server.

You've made a large number of authoritative-sounding comments on this story... and this one, like many of the others, is a guess.

To the extent that I can't tell what would actually happen in an alternate future where Feist v. Rural occurred in the digital realm, sure. To the extent that the CFAA allows companies to make that type of determination today in the actual timeline, no, it's not a guess (and I have the wrecked business to prove it).

Exactly. You can't copyright facts.

You can't copyright facts in the US. You effectively can in the EU, as the grandparent discussed, as long as you demonstrate that it took significant investment to arrange the compendium of facts from which they were drawn.

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