Proceedings of the Workshop on Promoting Access to Scientific and Technical Data for the Public Interest An Assessment of Policy Options (1999) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
8 Not-for-Profit-Sector Data
8 Not-for-Profit-Sector Data
Pages 153-169
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 153... ...
David Fulker, who runs the Unidata program at the University Corporation for Atmosphenc Research, is going to be speaking about meteorological data. km Lohr, of Chemical Abstracts Service, and Chris Overton, with the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania, will focus on chemical and genomic data, respectively.
|
From page 154... ...
Publishers and other sources of information are finding ways to get around some of these provisions; and we find ourselves increasingly getting into contractual arrangements with people and paying people to get information that historically we gathered up for free. On the other side, however, we do enjoy the protection of the copyright laws and all that this protection entails, especially in terms of dealing abroad.
|
From page 155... ...
The problem is that you-don't get very much protection once an original database enters copyright law. Feist would, at the most, give you protection against wholesale duplication of your copyrightable database, but there are very real questions about what would happen if people took systematic extracts of disparate data from your database and built on it, if that would be protected.
|
From page 156... ...
I don't think we ever would rely solely upon regulations to protect us from that problem. The best protection that we have against truly damaging mass copying is that there is so much information available in the database that someone would require a large amount of time with unrestricted access if that were the approach taken.
|
From page 157... ...
If you are in this business, economic necessity forces you to drive your database production operation more and more toward algorithmic generation of those databases. It depends on what kind of a database you are building, how you do that, and which way you do it, but the more successful you are at doing that, the less likely you are to be able to argue persuasively that you continue to enjoy copyright protection.
|
From page 158... ...
The National Weather Service tried to economize on data networking among the radars in this country, and so they granted to four companies exclusive access to the outputs of those radars with the assumption being, ~ believe, that these four companies would compete with one another, which would keep the costs low and would be a reasonably good way to make these data publicly available. ~ won't go into the details about this situation, but the net result has been that these data are actually much more expensive than any of the other data that we use.
|
From page 159... ...
This was formerly known as the proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code; it is now known as the proposed Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, and it would validate "click-on" and "shrink-wrap" licenses without mutual assent in the classical sense of the term. Harvey Perlman is an expert on this subject, but isn't actually involved in the negotiations.
|
From page 160... ...
Are you going to wake up some morning and just have no protection whatsoever in Europe because they get relentless about their database directive, and then how do you truly protect yourself? Can you fall back on contractual arrangements?
|
From page 161... ...
So if we jump to question 5 What are we going to look at five years down the road? imagine that this situation is going to get worse as the value of the databases goes up, and the chance is that someone will say, "You will to have to monitor usage by every individual who comes to your site." There may be technical solutions for this, such as using digital signatures or something that goes with license agreements, but we are not there yet.
|
From page 162... ...
Overton's point is the notion that it puts more burdens on the institution instead of focusing on what you are there to do, which is work with the data and create new databases and integrate vast knowledge and have access to information. The work would be to set in place new licensing pnvileges or not privileges, depending on who the users are, and one problem is that you shouldn't have to monitor or move in that direction because it is not a part of what you should be doing.
|
From page 163... ...
~ am from Stanford University. We define members of the Stanford community in different regards if they are doing clinical work, if they are doing basic science work, or doing education, and to identify people, much less classify them, becomes an extraordinarily difficult task.
|
From page 164... ...
There are a few, shall we say, vocal folks who are keen on asserting unfair competition, but this is not uniform by any means. ~ think Unidata and the Web, and the Internet in general, are sort of evil manifestations of what is happening, which is that some database providers had an economic mode!
|
From page 165... ...
DR. OVERTON: Absolutely, and because of the other features that will come with the Web, like security features, people may say that the easiest solution to dealing with access to our databases is to only provide access through this peephole view of the data, through the Web.
|
From page 166... ...
This is not a prowess of our company; it is a change in technology. So now the challenge for science is to be able to digest and manipulate all of these data, and that ~ think plays exactly to where Chris Overton is.
|
From page 167... ...
This went to the heart of the concerns of many of us regarding the legislative process last year because there was total downstream control of all uses. In essence, there was no transformative use permitted.
|
From page 168... ...
That is an unintended consequence of the database producers trying to protect themselves against other competitors. It may be possible to develop some collective contractual arrangements through some guidelines, something like Jerome Reichman talked about, to include the terms under which the academic community for science and educational purposes should work and talk about how we cannot be impeded by these interfaces that are there for other purposes.
|
From page 169... ...
Coble or anyone else comes up with and get involved and get related communities involved in assessing specifically how that legislation could have an adverse impact on your operations, commercial or noncommercial. That specific analysis and response with concrete examples is going to be the only thing that produces any type of balance in the ultimate legislative process.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.