{"id":313653,"date":"2010-02-12T19:46:10","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T00:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100212\/0220428141.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-12T19:46:10","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T00:46:10","slug":"australian-court-says-you-cant-copyright-facts-phone-books-not-protected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/313653","title":{"rendered":"Australian Court Says You Can’t Copyright Facts; Phone Books Not Protected"},"content":{"rendered":"

sinsi<\/a> is the first of a few to alert us to another good copyright ruling in Australia (following the recent iiNet ruling<\/a> — though the Kookaburra ruling<\/a> is still pretty bad), finding that (as in the US) a collection of facts alone is not copyrightable<\/a>. The specific case involved a telephone book, and whether or not the collection of numbers was covered by copyright. The court, smartly, rejected copyright on such a collection of factual information:<\/p>\n


\n“None of the Works were original,” Justice Gordon said in her judgement this week.<\/p>\n

“None of the people said to be authors of the Works exercised ‘independent intellectual effort’ or ‘sufficient effort of a literary nature’ in creating the (directories).’<\/p>\n

“Further, if necessary, the creation of the Works did not involve some ‘creative spark’ or the exercise of the requisite ‘skill and judgment’.”
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There are some places that do allow copyrights on aggregated facts, but a growing body of research has found that such “database rights” or copyrights on aggregated facts tends to hinder innovation<\/a> rather than encourage it — and if the purpose of copyright law is to create incentives for new works and for innovation, allowing copyrights on collections of factual information is a bad idea. So, congrats to Australia on another good copyright ruling. Of course, this one will likely be appealed as well, and with lobbyists already pushing to amend copyright law<\/a> following the iiNet ruling, I’m sure someone will try to change copyright law to include a database right as well, despite all the evidence of how harmful it is overall.<\/p>\n

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sinsi is the first of a few to alert us to another good copyright ruling in Australia (following the recent iiNet ruling — though the Kookaburra ruling is still pretty bad), finding that (as in the US) a collection of facts alone is not copyrightable. The specific case involved a telephone book, and whether or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}