Court Says You Can Copyright Numerical Ratings
TechDirt Jul 16 09The US, thankfully, still hasn't allowed copyright on databases. There's been a push over the years to allow such a database right, but this is problematic for a variety of reasons -- mainly that it's effectively a way to allow the copyrighting of facts, so long as you put a few of them together. But a bigger issue is that there's empirical evidence that the ability to copyright a database doesn't create more databases or actually help businesses. It does the opposite. It limits business -- exactly the opposite of copyright's stated purpose. If we actually had an empirically driven copyright system, there wouldn't be database rights, because the evidence that they do more harm than good is quite clear. Full story...
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