The controversial cybermaxim that "information wants to be free" lies close to the heart of a San Francisco Web piracy lawsuit filed last week. The copyright suit, which seeks to clamp down on commercial copies of digital facts, is also an attempt ensure the continued availability of free information, says the president of the company which filed the complaint.
"If we put that information on the Web, and if competitors can simply rip-off that information for commercial purposes without penalty, it's got no value," says Gerry Goldsholle, president of Expert Pages, a legal database that bills itself as "the original free Internet directory" of expert witnesses and consultants. "The Web will just become a place for academics to ramble at each other and kids to post pictures of their goldfish."
Filed Tuesday in the US District Court in San Francisco, Expert Pages' lawsuit charges that competitor LawInfo.com invaded the Expert Web site with the express purpose of getting paid listings from the same experts who list their services on Expert. The complaint also charges that LawInfo then spammed Experts' listees with as many as 30 emails a day in an effort to get them to sign up with the rival service.
The suit is a single shot in the battle against an epidemic of digital-age copyright infringements. The basic problem, say experts, is the sudden availability of a mass of information that can be as easily copied as read.
"There are several issues here," says Brian Fitzgerald, an intellectual-property attorney with the Washington, DC, firm Swidler & Berlin. "The first is simply educating people about existing copyright laws which, if people knew about them, would still be perfectly suitable to an electronic environment. The second is even finding out that information has been illegally copied."
Of course, the specter of online profitability is one of the main forces driving the Legal Experts v. LawInfo.com copyright tangle.
"Nobody can afford the resources it takes to compile and document original information, then offer it free of charge to the public unless there's some source of revenue to be gained from it," says Goldsholle.
But Gunter Enzo, CEO of LawInfo.com, maintains that his company did nothing wrong and that the overlap in listings, if it exists, is a negotiable matter.
"Attorneys list themselves all over the place," he said in a phone interview. "Any duplicate names and addresses could have come from anywhere. Besides, I think it's more important for fledgling companies in a new industry to share this sort of information. I expect we'll be able to work this out amicably with Experts. They're a good service."
Goldsholle disputes Enzo's assertion that the names could have "come from anywhere." His evidence? "Seed" names and email addresses that existed only on the Experts site. "There's no way they could have gotten those names except by coming in and stripping our site," Goldsholle said. As for Enzo's contention that the number of duplicate names is negotiable, Goldsholle is contemptuous. "That's like a bank robber saying to Bank of America, 'Look, I only robbed one branch. You've got tons. What's the problem?"
Extreme as it sounds, Goldsholle's bank robbery analogy is not so far off the mark. Fitzgerald notes that copying for commercial purposes is a federal criminal offense, but one which - when forced to compete against violent crimes for scarce law enforcement resources - gets fairly short shrift from prosecutors.
"Really, civil remedies are often the most effective means of policing these things," he said.
