Talk:World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty

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Damian Yerrick added:

However, the treaty itself did not require any copyright term extension beyond the Berne Convention's life-plus-50 term.

True, but why mention this here? There is an infinite number of other things that the treaty didn't require either, why single out this particular one? If its a common misconception, I'd note it as such; otherwise I'd delete this. -- SJK

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I added that because Congress passed the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA one day apart, both by unaccountable voice vote, so it may appear that both acts implemented the same treaty.

I disagree that the treaty was implemented in full. The actual declaration indictated points where the U.S. refused to comply with the treaty. Tcaudilllg (talk) 10:26, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pro WIPO?

"deemed necessary in the modern information era." by whom? "ensures" "provides"

Deemed so by WIPO. Not necessarily pro- or anti-, just saying that they deemed it neccessary.

[edit] U.S. doesn't fully comply with WIPO

the arrangement and selection of material in databases is protected in its fifth.

I'm pretty sure the U.S. mentions nothing about this at all in the copyright law. There is no specific mention of it at all, not even in DMCA. Tcaudilllg (talk) 10:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The U.S. does not have the sui generis database right the EU has. Databases are protected in the U.S. simply as collections. Lupo 12:15, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Not even.

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat092303.html "In the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress included in the definition of “compilation” the first express statutory link between compilations and original works of authorship “...that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes a work of authorship.” (8) Cases under the 1976 Act were divided about the continuing viability of the sweat of the brow doctrine. Some circuits continued to apply it, (9) while other circuits rejected it, requiring a showing of sufficient creativity in order to entitle a compilation to copyright protection. (10) The Supreme Court resolved the split in the circuits in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. (11) In that case, the Supreme Court held that the white pages of a telephone directory (containing an alphabetical listing of all residents with telephone service in a defined geographic area) was insufficiently creative to merit copyright protection. The Court held that the requirement of creativity was not merely statutory, but rooted in the Copyright Clause itself. (12) Thus, the sweat of the brow doctrine was laid to rest.

What remains is a thin layer of copyright protection for qualifying databases. In order to qualify, they must exhibit some modicum of creativity in the selection, arrangement, or coordination of the data. The protection is thin in that only the creative elements (selection, arrangement, or coordination of data) are protected by copyright. Explanatory materials such as introductions or footnotes to databases may also be copyrightable. But in no case is the data itself (as distinguished from its selection, coordination or arrangement) copyrightable. The absence of uniform protection for noncreative databases is what has given rise to the calls for this legislation."

And, that legislation is still in committee. Tcaudilllg (talk) 13:05, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

That quote describes the current state and confirms my statement above. In a collection, you always only get a copyright on selection, arrangement, intro, etc. The individual elements of the collection are subject to their own copyright, and if those individual elements are PD or ineligible to copyright (plain facts, data), then they remain uncopyrighted even if included in a collection. Lupo 15:19, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

How about this: is the actual data in a videogame ROM copyrighted under U.S. law? Not the program or content available which the data is processed, but the actual data? If a person were to modify a program dump under U.S. law, would that be reverse engineering or copyright infringement? Would it be infringement for them to distribute software that performs their modification if the software does not contain the copyrighted material? Tcaudilllg (talk) 15:38, 3 April 2008 (UTC)