The issue is increasingly important because electronic databases have become integral to all kinds of commercial and educational activities on the Internet. Many database owners want a federal law to ensure that their data collections are not duplicated and sold by others trying to get a free ride on what they spent time and money to compile. But in protecting the labors of database owners, Congress must be careful not to limit the use of facts that should remain in the public domain, a restriction that could be far worse than any problem the legislation is seeking to cure.
Databases already enjoy some protections.
Many states have misappropriation laws that can be used to bar database piracy, while federal copyright law affords protection to the expression, selection and arrangement of facts within a database, but not, it must be stressed, to the facts themselves. The bill would deter database piracy by imposing new federal civil and criminal penalties. But its broad language goes too far in limiting the reuse of factual information contained in a protected database, and in allowing a database owner to control future uses of that information. The bill would prohibit most users of a database from making available information from that collection of data if the action would cause financial harm to the original database publisher. This could deter innovators from building new and better databases by recombining, culling or adding information to existing databases.