Having failed to secure passage of an international treaty creating new intellectual property rights for database contents, publishing giants Thomson Corporation (the Canadian owner of West Publishing) and Reed Elsevier Inc. (the UK-based owner of Lexis-Nexis) are now lobbying Congress to secure passage of HR 2652, the Collection of Information Antipiracy Act.
Introduced by Representative Howard Coble (R-North Carolina), chair of the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, the bill would sharply curtail the use of information in the public domain by giving data compilers perpetual and exclusive property rights to material in their databases.
As written, HR 2652 provides civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized extraction and use of data gathered from any nongovernmental "collection of information." The only safe harbor in the bill is for news reporting – even scientific, research, and educational uses of information from a database would be illegal if harmful to any actual or potential market for the data compiler's own products or services. Proponents hope this bill will establish a pay-per-use system for information.
Critics contend that the bill could wreak havoc on search-engine providers and fantasy-baseball leagues while discouraging the development of new information products and services. According to Prudence Adler of the Association of Research Libraries, "HR 2652 would fundamentally change the way people use information by making it far more difficult to access and afford."
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