Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: BGB Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: And The Award For Most Legally-Encumbered =?UTF-8?B?4oCcSGVs?= =?UTF-8?B?bG8gV29ybGTigJ0gUHJvZ3JhbSAuLi4=?= Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:01:23 -0700 Organization: albasani.net Lines: 36 Message-ID: References: <9b584a36-f160-4e01-8e2f-ca3f83f17ee4@x10g2000yqj.googlegroups.com> <5b0642c5-0634-4b8b-98fc-e9bfcbba1064@b42g2000yqi.googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.albasani.net TUupnlhEDnfZVntj+BOLF2msdcu7tefWtRo3BNjGObbEfCceUaTlS9DF8YBb82Dn0mdUp1kk2wmb9eHj/CZksA== NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 08:04:31 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: news.albasani.net; logging-data="qbIdIF+N5RJQlrVynp450Wg6+LwFAA91ijMr9iJmE95d25Rwux2/EuigeuKv4EwpKGwhurGEx3W/jfg6dEKPLMXe/59o/R/tb7It68EePDnwz/3toR2hr1OkUGBbTeQw"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@albasani.net" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:cdGapF4v0gsowAVuWAweGtIzTBE= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4932 On 6/2/2011 10:07 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message, Arved Sandstrom wrote: > >> "Original" for copyright means independent creative effort. > > Does that mean that databases can’t be copyrighted? the stuff I went and read on the matter mostly defined the "original" in the copyright sense in terms of "the original concrete expression". this seems to partly exclude the creative aspect, and does include many of the traditional things which *are* copyrighted: aggregates of various files or data; random images or recordings of various things; ... however, apparently copyright does not cover "tables of numbers or other factual data", which could, possibly, be taken to imply an inability to copyright a database... but, taken to its logical extreme, this would effectively undermine the ability to apply copyright to data in the first place, since one "could" attempt to apply such an interpretation to data as a whole ("every file is just a big table of numbers in the range of 0 to 255..."). which, of course, would not likely hold water in court... "well, these DVD ISOs were just simply tables of numbers..." and "I didn't actually distribute the files, they just happened to sort of leak out and rain down on these various computers in a sort of bit-torrent...". as the jury just stands there being like "right...".