On 4/3/2012 2:00 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
2. we considered all datasets factual data thus not copyrightable (in
USA? around the globe?)
This is definitely true in the US, but not true globally. I have no
idea under which jurisdiction a lawsuit would apply.
I'd be careful with the word "definitely". The major media
conglomerates and their industry associations have successfully
destroyed competition to their hegemony in many areas. For example,
they sued college students for close to $100 billion, because their
improvements of search engines made it easier for people in a university
intranet to find copyrighted music placed by others in their "public"
folder. They successfully sued lawyers who advised MP3 that they had
reasonable grounds to believe what they did would be legal and Venture
Capitalists who funded Napster. In each case, they won not on the law
but on the fact that they had larger budgets for lawyers. See Lessig
(2004) Free Culture [book available from Amazon and also for free under
the Creative Commons license; see Wikipedia, "Free Culture (book),
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29>"].
Spencer Graves
Hadley
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