. "4 Economic Forces in the Production, Dissemination, and Use of Scientific and Technical Databases." Proceedings of the Workshop on Promoting Access to Scientific and Technical Data for the Public Interest: An Assessment of Policy Options. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1999.
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE WORKSHOP ON PROMOTING ACCESS TO SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DATA FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST: AN ASSESSMENT OF POLICY OPTIONS
could not reverse engineer the software code to get into this program because it would be a violation of copyright to reverse copy the poem. So, copyright protection can sometimes have some very extraordinary consequences.
Would database protection involve the same problem? I think it depends on how the law is written. It might, or it might not. We have certain features of copyright that lend to instances of considerably strong protection, more so than most patents.
Number two, with regard to the appropriate regime, whether it should be a liability regime along the line of trade secrets, I really haven 't thought a lot about that. I would merely say that I know a comment was made earlier about a database protection regime along the lines of unfair competition and trademark. There are some instances in which trademarks have been used in a very restrictive way. It can work that way as well.
