Actually, I'm pretty sure a phone book is not, in the US, in general,
copyrightable.
I don't believe US law has any special protection for "collections of
facts". The canonical introductory intellectual property class example,
which happens to be about a phone book in fact, is Feist v. Rural
Telephone Service. Which in fact even has it's own wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
Jonathan
Shawn Boyette wrote:
Individual facts or datum are not copyrightable, but "collections of
facts" -- particular expressions of data -- are. This is what makes
phone books, databases, and the like subject to copyright.
P.S. N.B. IANAL
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Interestingly, outside the US it's somewhat more possible to claim copyright
on "factual data" than inside the US, Europe for instance has types of IP
and copyright protection for databases that the US does not.
But basically, the answer is that nobody knows for sure, not even the
lawyers.
Jonathan
Bryan Baldus wrote:
On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:17 PM, Nate Vack wrote:
Huh. They claim copyright of these records. I'd somehow thought:
1: The federal government can't hold copyrights
The page [1] states:
"Copyright"
"Records in the MARC Distribution Services originating with the Library of
Congress are copyrighted by the Library of Congress for use outside the
United States. Subscribers are granted copyright permission to selectively
redistribute records outside the United States; contact LC prior to any
distribution."
So, in the U.S., they are not copyrightable, but outside the U.S. some
copyright claim might be justified.
2: As purely factual data, catalog records are conceptually
uncopyrightable
For the most part, personally I would agree with this, at least for
individual records (though some parts of the record, like the 520 summaries,
might contain enough original creativity that could be considered
copyrightable). Others might believe otherwise, at least as it pertains to
the collection of the records as a whole--for example, OCLC's copyright
claims on their database of records.
##########################
On the Fred 2.0 records, aside from their age, I wish they were available
in MARC 21 format rather than XML with NFC encoding. When I tried to use
MarcEdit to convert the files from XML to MARC 21 (January 2007), I ran into
issues with character encodings. The files also seemed to lack header lines
like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<collection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim";>
[1] <http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>
Thank you for your assistance,
Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
