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Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade,
and Consumer Protection joint hearing with the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act of 2003" September 23, 2003 Chairman Stearns and Chairman Smith, the debate over whether adequate legal protections exist to protect current databases and provide incentives to the creation of new and more valuable databases is an extremely contentious issue that has been debated in our respective Committees for several years. Databases are essential to ensuring the rapid search and retrieval of the enormous amounts of facts and other forms of information that are available, especially through the Internet. In fact, the Internet not only provides access to already created databases, but it has helped spur a remarkable growth in the number of databases, such as movie directories and loan comparison charts. Between 1990 and 2002, the number of database entries in the comprehensive Gale Directory of Databases has increased 147 percent. Moreover, the amount of information contained in such databases has increased 363 percent. I note that this explosive growth in the number of databases has occurred despite the claims of the proponents of the draft legislation that "no meaningful legal protection of databases currently exists." I find it dubious that companies would invest vast amounts of financial resources in developing new databases if legal protections were nonexistent. In fact, significant legal protections already exist for databases. For example, the original selection, coordination, and arrangement of facts in a database are protected by copyright law. Additionally, databases already receive protection under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and various state laws such as trespass to chattels, breach of contract, and misappropriation. Notwithstanding the legal protections available, limited gaps in current law may exist. If such gaps are found, it is incumbent upon Congress to take a focused legislative approach as we attempted to do in the 106th Congress with H.R. 1858, the "Consumer and Investor Access to Information Act of 1999." This bill was narrowly crafted to provide limited protection to database producers against wholesale misappropriation of their work. Importantly, it would also have allowed the public to continue to have unfettered access to facts that are in the public domain. Unfortunately, the draft Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act of 2003 takes the opposite approach. It would create broad new rights for database owners and dramatically alter our current information policy. Much like its predecessors, the draft bill has serious flaws and would stifle the development of a robust electronic commerce marketplace. It would create a quasi-property right in facts themselves, granting the compiler of information an unprecedented right to control value-added, downstream uses of the resulting collection. It would also establish an unprecedented subpoena process that would undoubtedly lead to abuse. I must caution those who support broad new protections for databases. Electronic commerce has prospered in the United States in part because of our basic information policy - that facts, the building blocks of all information products, cannot be owned. Facts are part of the public domain. They do not owe their origin to an act of authorship. It is important that facts remain available for everyone to use and that Congress does not legislate in a way that would restrict the public's access to facts. - 30 - (Contact: Jodi Bennett, 202-225-3641) | |
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