Crisis over copyrights

Most businesses see only dollar signs when they think of the Internet, but electronic information brokers like Lexis-Nexis see red.

These companies want to stop what they view as nothing less than information highway robbery committed by Netizens who copy, share, or post portions of commercial databases. And to counter this digital banditry, the Information Industry Association has been lobbying to pass laws that allow databases to be copyrighted.

The idea, which has been defeated in Congress twice before, suffered another setback Thursday when the United States distanced itself from a database treaty being debated by the World Intellectual Property Organization as it meets this month on international copyright law in Geneva, Switzerland. Nevertheless, it isn't likely to die anytime soon, even though critics contend that the idea is overkill and would stifle free speech and marketplace competition.

The concept is known by the obscure Latin term of sui generis, which translates literally to "of a kind." But its consequences are far from academic.

Today, it's only possible to copyright databases if the owner can prove some originality in the selection, arrangement, or expression of facts. So, while an encyclopedia can be copyrighted, the facts contained in it remain in the public domain.

Bruce Lehman, U.S. patents commissioner

Under the sui generis concept, however, hundreds of years of precedent would be reversed to allow database owners to copyright any collection of facts in which they have made a "substantial" investment.

As proposed in the Geneva treaty, the sui generis concept could expunge rafts of information from the public domain, impair free speech, and put a deep freeze on research as well as competition, according to the opposing letters that poured in to the U.S. delegation at Geneva last week.