Copyright issues As the Web is an information space, a vital area is that of copyright and

6.2 Copyright issues As the Web is an information space, a vital area is that of copyright and

intellectual property. Copyrights protect the expression of an idea, and so are narrow – they don’t prevent others releasing, say, novels with similar storylines to a novel currently under copyright – and are aimed to protect an author’s, musician’s or other creative person’s distinctive contribution. The narrowness makes it hard to use copyright law in the commercial software arena, so for instance the US Supreme Court upheld Borland’s appeal against Lotus after the latter sued the former for ‘borrowing’ features of Lotus 1-2-3’s interface. There are now exten- sive rights in both the US and Europe allowing reverse engineering and copying to produce compatibility, in the public interest [247].

Databases, treated as compilations, have been in receipt of the same protection as literary works (i.e. protected for 50 years after the cre- ation or 70 years after the death of the creator in the UK), but fol- lowing an EU directive in the late 1990s, a database is protected for

15 years following its last major change. The selection of information and its arrangement must amount to an intellectual effort to obtain, verify or present it. There have as yet been very few cases brought to establish precedents, but given the quantity of the deep Web that is contained in databases, and the aims of the Semantic Web commu- nity to bring together distributed information from a range of rela- tional databases, it is quite likely that database rights will become the subject of increasingly searching debate in the future [132]. More generally a new European directive (2003/98/EC, http://www.ec- gis.org/document.cfm?id=486&db=document) on Public Sector Infor- mation has come into force. One of its objectives is to expedite the publication of and access to the considerable amounts of data col- lected by governments in their various functions. In the UK this has

6.3. Transgressive behaviour 101 led to the creation recently of an Office of Public Sector Information

(www.opsi.gov.uk) – they are taking a close look at whether the SW is an appropriate vehicle for fulfilling their obligations.

Copyright is currently the focus for a major argument in the field of intellectual property law. Some stakeholders point out that digital technology, and the connectivity of the Web, have between them made piracy very straightforward – copying and distribution are the simplest things in the world, and so they support the development of technolo- gies and legal instruments to prevent or limit unauthorised reproduc- tion. Others point out that the power of the Web comes precisely from the serendipitous reuse of content, and that most uses of information, particularly in the context of the Web, are harmless and desirable, most of all in academe [131]. The argument turns on whether creativity is more likely to be stifled by the loss of incentives for authors whose copyright becomes worthless, or the shrinking of the commons and the public domain [93]. Lawrence Lessig has argued for the idea of a ‘cre- ative commons’ (http://creativecommons.org/), which is intended to offer a flexible range of protections for works that do not stifle open- ness. Metadata is attached to works effectively waiving some or all of the rights that copyright law provides the author [187].

There are similar divisive arguments about patents, which give inventors a twenty year monopoly of the use of a new, useful and non- obvious discovery, but these arguments require as much discussion of institutions and governmental procedures, and the wider economics of intellectual property. Patents (and trade secrets) are reviewed in [93].