This is an area where US law differs importantly from other countries. US
law protects compilations of facts only to the extent that the selection
of the facts is creative expression (and does not protect the facts
themselves). Many other jurisdictions (eg European Union) also offer
protection based on the effort need to compile the facts regardless of any
creativity. A 1997 US Supreme Court decision (in a case about telephone
directories) ruled that the 'sweat of the brow' rationale for copyright
was inconsistent with the intellectual property clause of the US
Constitution. So, in the US, it depends on the data and their source.
Publishers that I have talked to tend to claim that data are definitely
copyrightable, but since they tend to own the copyrights one might do well
to recall the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies.
-thomas
Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
[EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Washington, Seattle
On Sat, 12 May 2007, hadley wickham wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> This is a little bit off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone has any
> informed opinion on whether data (ie. a dataset) is copyrightable?
>
> Hadley
>
> ______________________________________________
> [email protected] mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
[EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Washington, Seattle
______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
