Wed, 25 Feb 2009

Court Upholds AP For 'quasi-property'

Unbelievable. What the Hel is "quasi-property"? Isn't that like being "quasi-pregnant"? You cannot own facts - oh, wait, of course you can, since we began allowing patents on math, genetics and software.

I guess even this humble blog had best watch what I link to to going forward. Because the slippery slope some of us have been railing about for years just got a good greasing.

A federal court ruled that the AP can sue competitors for 'quasi-property' rights on hot news, as well as for copyright infringement and several other claims. The so-called 'hot news' doctrine was created by a judge 90 years ago in another case, where the AP sued a competitor for copying wartime reporting and bribing its employees to send them a copy of unreleased news. The courts' solution was to make hot news a form of 'quasi-property' distinct from copyright, in part because facts cannot be copyrighted. But now the AP is making use of the precedent again, going after AHN which competes with the AP, alleging that they're somehow copying the AP's news. The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it.

(link) [Slashdot]

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