Yes, it is like they think they get copyright/IP over someone else's content that they had no part in producing, just syndicating without any license. Irks me every time Dario at Anthropic calls for regulation to prevent distillation.
You can have a copyright of a collection of facts even if you don't have a copyright of each individual fact in the collection.
Here's mine[1], stating that yes databases do get some copyright protection from the collection layer to the extent that some creative addition happens.
I never claimed the individual facts/data were given copyright to the collector. Let's stick to what I said if you are going to quibble with my comment.
> Yes, it is like they think they get copyright/IP over someone else's content that they had no part in producing, just syndicating without any license.
Here's what you said:
> You do realize that US IP law does work that way, right? You can have a copyright of a collection of facts even if you don't have a copyright of each individual fact in the collection.
Here's where you've gone wrong in those original comments:
- The original poster is talking about copyright-able works (in the context of this thread, those are websites).
- We're eliding "websites" into "facts" somehow - and as I've said, facts aren't copyrightable (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102) - and collections of facts (which are only have copyright over creative portions)
- And your first sentence is misleading as the poster is talking about the content of websites being treated as copyrighted by the collector, so we're already off track with the implication that the "fact" (website) is copyrighted when it's part of a database by the database constructor.
- I then proceeded to talk about how collections of facts interact here (ie: 'even supposing if' websites were somehow facts, which they generally aren't under copyright law).
- That's where the "only the creative parts of the database are copyright-able" (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...) comes in. And again, refer back to the original comment, which is about the websites themselves, so we're kind of off track talking about creative parts of databases, but it is somewhat relevant due to comments further up talking mentioning the "relevance scores, or rankings" as something that the agreement prevents using freely. Those "relevance scores, or rankings" might be protected by copyright, though I suspect it would be a close call.
- Making a database of all websites is not creative (see the Feist Pubs., Inc. v. Rural Tel. Svc. Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) linked above, where a database of all phone numbers was determined to not be creative in itself). If the results of a particular search (ie: which results correspond to a particular search) are copyrighted hasn't been fully litigated, but Google themselves didn't claim their search results were copyrighted in the ongoing Google LLC v. SerpApi, LLC (4:25-cv-10826) litigation (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46..., III. B. 1 has a discussion).
Now to the most recent comment:
> Here's mine[1], stating that yes databases do get some copyright protection from the collection layer to the extent that some creative addition happens.
You haven't distinguished it from my previous comment with a statement on what is copyrightable in collections of facts. If you believe that non-creative parts of collections are copyrightable, then examine the references above in this comment, and the section in what you've linked titled "Feist: Originality and Creativity". If you don't believe that, then you may want to be more clear.
It is just like if someone scoured the internet for images and sold them in a book as a collection. They couldn’t do that without rights to those images.
Now imagine that the book “author” says you can’t copy the images from the book because they claim to own those images, without any copyright of any kind.
That is what they are trying to do. But with a different kind of copyrighted work.
The Search API is acting as a database of a collection of webpages where the collection layer is the copyrightable thing. This is analogous to Google being able to copyright its search engine without having copyrights to all of the underlying content within the search corpus.
If your quibble is about the crawling / scraping, I'm not going to argue. It's easy for mass scraping to fall into unethical / illegal territory and I think that is the original sin of the AI foundation models.
Databases are copyrightable whether their content are facts (one example of content) or other data. I used the word facts because I knew from memory that was protected in US IP law.
A full copy of the indexable web isn't a creative work at all. It isn't a collection that has been curated, it is just the whole thing.