licenses

Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts reports on a Congressional hearing held last week on whether the first sale doctrine should apply to digital goods. Buyers of e-books or e-music can't resell those digital goods or leave them behind when they die because they are licensing the goods from companies like Amazon and Apple, Roberts writes. Congressional members were skeptical about creating a digital-based first sale doctrine, but expressed concern that licenses for digital goods were too lopsided against consumers. "The most popular solution to the problem of diminished property rights appears to be better licenses," Roberts concludes.

The Atlantic reports on the release of the new version of the Creative Commons copyright license yesterday. The new license addresses how the Creative Commons license interacts with database rights. In the European Union and other jurisdictions, compilers of databases have rights over who copies and uses their databases for 15 years, but those database rights aren't protected by copyright in the United States, The Atlantic also reports. "That’s because facts can’t be copyrighted in the U.S., and databases—especially non-creative ones—are just collections of facts," according to The Atlantic.