I'm sorry, but that fact belongs to me. Prepare to be sued.

[hot_pastrami]

Wired News has an article about the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261), which was just approved by the House Judiciary Committee, and is on it's way to the commerce committee.

This is one of those nasty DMCA-like bills that is poised to take a big, wet bite out of the majority's rights in favor of a handful or corporate sponsors. It basically allows a collection of facts to be owned, which flies in the face of the Copyright Act, which disallows mere information and ideas from being owneded in this way.

Under the terms of the broadly written bill, a public-health website could be deemed in violation of the law for gathering a list of the latest health headlines and providing links to them on its home page.

Google would be in violation for trolling media databases and providing stories on its news page.

An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date.

"The law of unintended consequences in this case has the potential to be huge," Brodsky said.

Can you feel your freedom eroding away?