Does not stop people threatening you though.
This is my opinion only, not legal advice, and does not relate to my employment.
that was changed
https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html
Databases are generally protected by copyright law as compilations. Under the Copyright Act, a compilation is defined as a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 17. U.S.C. § 101. The preexisting materials or data may be protected by copyright, or may be unprotectable facts or ideas (see the BitLaw discussion on unprotected ideas for more information).
(I did not use AI, but this appeared at the top of my search and I think the search engine used AI to generate it):
In the European Union, databases are protected under the Database Directive, which provides legal protection based on the originality of the selection or arrangement of their contents...Some countries offer additional protections for databases that do not meet the originality requirement, often through sui generis rights.
Taking their example, if you had a collections from quotes from presidents, and I got a bunch of similar collections, then made my own ultimate definitive collection based partially on your list, then there’s very little chance I’d be liable for violating your copyright. If I copied the list and typesetting verbatim, you’d have a better case.
Also, modern rulings about LLM training (the topic of this thread) certainly mean copyrights on compilations of facts don’t survive training + inference cycles.
Copyright is about reproduction. It does not cover uses. Once you bought it, it's yours, as long as you don't reproduce it outside of fair use.
The problem with most language models is they will often uncritically reproduce significant portions of copyrighted works.
This isn't a counter argument, just pointing out how absurd copyright is.
(IANAL)
The fundamental policy choice was to protect computer software under intellectual property law, with exclusive rights and market compensation. There were a number of ways that could have been done. Other jurisdictions toyed with new, software-specific laws. But in the end the call in the US was to bring it under existing copyright law with some tweaks to definitions and a small handful of software-specific rules.
Copyrighting software is as absurd the other things you listed.
Even if it is art (I'm not convinced), the recent artificial scarcity on art is absurd. Some other thoughts to consider:
- https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html
- https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...
Are you talking about copyright here? It sounds more like design protection.
Wouldn't the book be as copyrightable as any other non-fiction work?
There's old but more recent law from Practice Management v AMA (1997) supporting that AMA's codes can't be copyrightable as they're part of legislation.
Berne's Art 2(8), to which USA are signed, related to non-copyright of facts.
I'm afraid I'm not appraised of the full situation, however.
Fight fire with fire.
