A database copyright in the US would be apocalyptically bad and terrible. The notion that facts can be owned offends reason. This Wired article explains why:
But Joe Rubin, executive director of technology and e-commerce for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says the bill’s threshold for proving “commercial harm” is very low.
He cited the example of a financial planner who gathers information from several sources, like Securities and Exchange Commission filings, public documents and the Dun & Bradstreet business database.
“If he assimilated the information and put it into a report for his client, under this bill that activity would be illegal and would subject him to lawsuits from every company whose website he accessed,” Rubin said.
He also says that despite Kupferschmid’s characterization, the bill puts no limit on the amount of information someone needs to take from a database to violate the law.
“The bill mentions databases and subsets of databases. A subset could be any bit of information in a database,” Rubin said.
A 1997 case between Motorola and the National Basketball Association could serve as an example. After Motorola sent basketball scores to its customers’ pagers, the NBA sued the company for misappropriating its property. A U.S. Appeals Court, however, ruled against the NBA.