Bill HR 3261: Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act

Andre wrote:
>I think that this will not hold true because of the 
>"substantial part" provision in section 3(a). But I 
>do agree that this is just one man's opinion until 
>the courts have spoken on the issue of what a 
>substantial part is.

Alex wrote:
>Thus Wikipedia contributors might only be able to 
>write articles if they do off line research and copy 
>that information ONLY from off line sources (rather 
>than doing some online research and rewriting the 
>information into new copyright original text).

This is bad, /real/ bad. I use the same two online
sources to add a whole bunch of information to the day
pages and I'm well over half way done for the year. I
think that by any objective measure I have been using
a substantial amount of information in those databases
(everything I use is completely rewritten - I thought
that was enough!). I've also been using three on-line
databases as references for the element articles.
Futhermore, WikiProject Elements members are almost
done importing nearly /all/ the information in one of
those databases, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's
periodic table (which is /not/ excluded under section
5(a)(1) since it is run by the University of
California), by rewriting LANL's text descriptions of
each element. The other two online resources are used
to fill-in the element tables (still a substantial
amount of information use!). I also had planned to
finish off each element article by using Encarta and
the Columbia Encyclopedia as final information
sources. It would seem that all that would become
illegal under this proposed law.

This bill has got to get killed! 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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