I.P.-o-mania

Plenty of intellectual-property issues in the past few days to comment on, from trivial inanity to potentially serious bills proposed in the Congress. Here we go:

Ghettopoly

Some of you may have heard of the controversy over Ghettopoly, a repulsive ripoff of Monopoly in which "playas" compete to "pimp ho's", sell crack, and put up crackhouses and "projects" instead of houses and hotels.

Obviously this is going to be offensive to many people on grounds of race, and there have been protests against the game in Philadelphia and other places. Personally, I find it just as offensive that the game frivolously glorifies stupid and destructive behavior like robbing banks, beating up "ho's", etc. As a clinically certified First Amendment fanatic, though, I can't justify supporting attempts to ban it because of its content. However, offensiveness is not the only problem here. It's also a pretty unimaginative ripoff of the venerable Parker Brothers' game, which blatantly imitates its structure and gameplay and clearly trades on its widely-recognized appearance and name for commercial gain. This led me to wonder whether Parker Brothers or the current holder of their trademarks would have standing to sue on intellectual-property grounds. Sure enough, it looks like Hasbro is doing so. It'll be interesting to see what develops. I have to admit that I find myself wondering whether I'd feel so supportive of Hasbro in this matter if their target weren't so unattractive.

Thanks to Loreen for mentioning it and inspiring me to go digging for more information.

Copyrighting facts

Traditionally, US courts have held that information itself, that is to say, isolated facts, as opposed to a unified work of creativity, cannot be copyrighted (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) ). That will change if industry lobbyists have their way and get HR 3261 , the so-called "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act", through Congress. The bill may make it possible for database publishers to prohibit libraries from publicly disseminating information from their databases -- a deathblow to libraries which have made themselves dependent on such databases, and a significant restriction on citizens' access to information through local libraries or state-level library consortia.

From the bill:

SEC. 3. PROHIBITION AGAINST MISAPPROPRIATION OF DATABASES.

(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--

(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;

(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and

(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

(b) INJURY- For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue.

(c) TIME SENSITIVE- In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved.

More commentary here, and here, and here, and here. The Association of Research Libraries has a timeline of legislative and political activity on this issue here.

Thanks to the clever folks at ALAWON for mentioning this in their newsletter.

Black Box Voting

Diebold, the company that manufactures and heavily lobbies for the use of computerized voting machines, is using the DMCA to squelch discussion of flaws in its machines, according to the current issue of Library Juice. EFF to the rescue!

This has been an ongoing issue. Many commentators have noted flaws in the machines' security, which raise the ugly specter of elections being decided by which political party's black-ops teams hire the better team of hackers. With phantom electronic votes, of course, there would be no embarrassing paper trail to be re-counted. Whoever hacked into or otherwise controlled the machines could simply declare a winner. Diebold has, according to documents published here and elsewhere, left gaping holes in the security features of their voting machines' auditing routines, the very feature that guards against such tampering, and appears determined not to fix them.

I don't know about you, but when I have something that absolutely, positively must be preserved in an undisputably accurate form, I print it out. Hanging chads or no hanging chads, a hard-copy paper trail is at least auditable and re-countable.