Posted on 05/05/2004 9:18:52 AM PDT by AKA Elena
Breeders Standard has stolen my Schipperke database and is offering it as a perk if you buy their software. Schipperke people, you don’t need that perk, as you already have my site to use for free.
Steve, I too noticed that the 23900 dogs that I keyed in all by myself to chronicle the history of the Schipperke breed have been stolen. I am the only one with that many Schipperke entries for the fancier to use, and that is the number of entries that the Breeders Standard suddenly have on their site. I feel frustrated and violated.
I am asking the Schipperke fancy to complain loudly to MBFS. Why should I do all this work so MBFS can steal it and sell their software with this stolen perk?
I will add a statement to my website about MBFS deceitful practice. Steve, you have my permission to link to my site. Perhaps if we contact news service who would be interested in a story on intellectual capital rights and the Internet. I offer my data free for use to the Schipperke fancy, not for a price, or to be held hostage by MBFS.
Permission to cross post...
Kristen Henry
Bonchien Schipperkes
Bonchien Pedigree Database
This site, which is offered at no cost to the Schipperke Fancy is a sophisticated and valuable resource offered to all os us in the Schipperke Breed, potential pet owners and potential "Fanciers".
A company called Man's Best Friend Software is offering Kristen's entire database bundled in their software which they are selling online.
This blatant intellectual piracy is questionable in its integrity, but is theft of hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of Kristen Henry's work which she offers free to those of us who use it. It has grown from a simple pedigree "maker" to an invaluable source of information on the progeny of every dog that has produced puppies (if they have been registered) and can be cross-referenced on the site for the latest genetic disease that is plaguing the breed.
Apparently other breeds which have any type of data base online have also been pirated, although I am not familiar with which breeds might be involved there -- I do know that Kristen't database has more than 300,000 entries whihch she keyed in herself.
Kristen is an animal genetecist and when she first offered the service, I suggested that she charge a fee for access or she would/could be taken advantage of ... to which she responded that she just wanted to offer something of value to the breed. She has not been involved in Schipperkes for very long -- perhaps 7 to 10 years.
I have given the link to the company which is offering this software and would welcome suggestions as to how to give the company something to think about. We (the Schipperke Fancy in particular) are not a large enough number to boycott them with any success.
It has been suggested that we contact the following section heads of the company and express our disgust and our further intent to see that their software is not the only product that they offer that we will boycott.
As a FReeper and a member who believes in justice (whether Kristen's information was free fodder or not) I would ask my Freeper family to join me in a huge protest to this company.
MBFS
655 North LaGrange Rd
. Suite 100
Frankfort, IL 60423
USA
Sales and Customer Service:
800-746-9364 then Press 1 (Toll Free)
815-806-2130 then Press 1 (outside USA)
Product Support:
888-820-0691 (Toll-free)
815-806-2130 then Press 2 (outside USA)
Administration:
815-806-2130 then Press 3
FAX: 815-806-2134
TBS, TCS, TES, TGH, NETigree®:
CompuPed™:
This is internet related and I am so vehement over the whole thing, not only because Kristen is a dear friend of mine, but because a portrait of my dog, which was a gift to me from the photogtapher, and hangs in my living room ... was hi-hacked and since appears all over the net. When this dog of mine died -- at nearly 17 years -- many of the owners/breeders of his "get" (sons and daughters) paid a tribute to him in our National Bulletin and the "now on net" photo was on the corner of each of their pages.
Perhaps this is not of interest to anyone here, but it seems that our Registered's great graphics being stolen and put in a graphics CD would be much the same thing.
The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that "sweat of the brow" is not a valid legal justification for copyrighting a work. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone for the ruling.
The way to protect this information is via contract, not copyright law.
That legislation appears unlikely to pass at the present time.
Anyway, the author could always get them on copyright infringement for that photo of the dog.
Yes, photos would be a different matter. They have the qualities of originality and creativity needed for copyright protection.
Sorry for this person, but it's good that it won't pass.
Life and the law are rarely that simple. From Feist:
Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity, are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilations through the copyright laws. Nimmer §§ 2.11[D], 3.03; Denicola 523, n. 38. Thus, even a directory that contains absolutely no protectible written expression, only facts, meets the constitutional minimum for copyright protection if it features an original selection or arrangement. See Harper & Row, 471 U.S., at 547. Accord Nimmer § 3.03.This protection is subject to an important limitation. The mere fact that a work is copyrighted does not mean that every element of the work may be protected. Originality remains the sine qua non of copyright; accordingly, copyright protection may extend only to those components of a work that are original to the author. Patterson & Joyce 800-802; Ginsburg, Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1865, 1868, and n. 12 (1990) (hereinafter Ginsburg). Thus, if the compilation author clothes facts with an original collocation of words, he or she may be able to claim a copyright in this written expression. Others may copy the underlying facts from the publication, but not the precise words used to present them. In Harper & Row, for example, we explained that President Ford could not prevent others from copying bare historical facts from his autobiography, see 471 U.S., at 556-557, but that he could prevent others from copying his "subjective descriptions and portraits of public figures." [p*349] Id., at 563. Where the compilation author adds no written expression but rather lets the facts speak for themselves, the expressive element is more elusive. The only conceivable expression is the manner in which the compiler has selected and arranged the facts. Thus, if the selection and arrangement are original, these elements of the work are eligible for copyright protection. See Patry, Copyright in Compilations of Facts (or Why the "White Pages" Are Not Copyrightable), 12 Com. & Law 37, 64 (Dec. 1990) (hereinafter Patry). No matter how original the format, however, the facts themselves do not become original through association. See Patterson & Joyce 776.
This inevitably means that the copyright in a factual compilation is thin. Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in an another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement. As one commentator explains it: "No matter how much original authorship the work displays, the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking . . . . The very same facts and ideas may be divorced from the context imposed by the author, and restated or reshuffled by second comers, even if the author was the first to discover the facts or to propose the ideas." Ginsburg 1868.
Essentially, if the original compiler put some effort into arranging the material into a useful format, that format itself is copyrightable, and therefore, if they literally lifted everything, format and style included, they may still be liable for copyright infringement. However, if/when they reformat the factual information underlying that into a new arrangement, that issue ceases to exist.
But the complaint here is that someone spent thousands of hours typing in the information, believing that sweat-of-the-brow would entitle the work for legal protection. It doesn't work that way.
Still not enough information. If they wrote a robot to browse through the site and take down all the static information, they were no more hacking than Google is when it indexes your site. Need to know exactly what happened.
It sucks that this lady had what sounds like a lot of legwork lifted from her, but that's the way this sort of thing works - if they took her material and put it into their own way of presenting it, they're as clean as a whistle as far as the law goes.
Well, there you go. From general_re's above reprint of the decision, "The only conceivable expression is the manner in which the compiler has selected and arranged the facts. Thus, if the selection and arrangement are original, these elements of the work are eligible for copyright protection." If the way she arranged and indexed defects and other things is unique, and useful facts are difficult to replicate without using her expressive, creative method of association and arrangement, she may have a case although it would still be thin. Talk to a copyright lawyer.
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