Tony Bowden wrote:
> The classic case is someone who retypes a phone book. You
> can't reissue it in the same order (i.e. alphabetic by surname)
> as the original, but you could quite happily order it numberic
> by phone number and no-one could do anything...
They could in Germany :-).
There's been quite a bit of hoo-ha about this in recent years. It started
out with a company providing a telephone CD (apparently they had people in
China type up printed telephone directories, which was cheaper than buying
the data from German Telecom) which also enabled you to search by number.
Then that was forbidden, and third-party companies started selling add-ons
that worked with vendor XYZ's telephone CD to add the reverse search back
in; those are forbidden, too, but these third parties are harder to get at.
I believe the reasoning given is data protection -- people consented to have
their name and number in a book but only for the usual use: looking up a
number by name. And that people are not allowed to provide reverse search
unless they have the consent of all the people involved.
Cheers,
Philip
