> > We should expect a
> > long hard fought legal battle...coming soon. I do not understand how the
> > folks at NTIA could have made this error (if, indeed, they did) since
> > the DOC did not have the constitutional authority to transfer a database
> > held in "public trust" over to a private corporation.
>
> 5 years ago, hardly anybody had heard of 'intellectual property' ...
> But if the DoC overstepped its authority, does the public have
> standing to sue for its IP rights?
There is a lot of fuzzyness going on about the term "IP rights" in the
zone and contact databases.
Clearly NSI has physical possession of the databases and nobody has the
right to break into their buildings or computers and take a copy (or the
original).
There may or may not be copyright rights in those databases -- the
uncertainly is because under a relatively recent US Supreme Court case,
collections of facts are, absent something special, not copyrightable.
However, there is more recent US Federal legislation on these matters
about which I know abysmally less than nothing (but about which I'm sure
that somebody will fill us in. ;-)
Thus, the existance or not of a copyright based Intellectual Property
right in the databases is something that is arguable.
However, as I said, even if the data is "public domain", that does not
give one the right to make copies unless one has the right to physically
access the data.
The NSF/NTIA-NSI Cooperative Agreement does give NTIA some rights to
obtain copies of some of these databases (I claim it gives 'em rights to
all of the databases, NSI and others claim otherwise) at the termination
of the Cooperative agreement.
Throw all this into a barrel and we have a lot of ambiguity about what
people mean when they talk about the IP rights in the various databases in
NSI's hands.
Precision is really important -- one needs to be very clear about which
database (e.g. root zone file, TLD zone file, contact database, etc),
about which kind of access is being discussed, and about which kind of IP
property right (if any) is being discussed.
--karl--
