Posted by Rick Denney on May 10, 2003 at 01:57:42:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Orchestra Salaries posted by Jim Andrada on May 09, 2003 at 14:02:40:
Though you are probably right in this case, most professional societies that do salary surveys sell them to their members (or offer them as benefits). So publishing it in a public forum would take away sales or membership value. There are your damages. I know for a fact that this is the position my own professional society would take. It wouldn't be a matter of privacy for them, either, because they don't identify employers or employees, only regions, and then in much broader terms than here. They may not sue me but they'd sure as heck write me a nasty cease and desist letter.
As to copyrighting factual information, I'm not so sure it is as wide open as you may think. You can't copyright information that is readily available in the public domain, but I believe it has to be available in the same form. You can copyright a collation of public-domain information, even if all you add is the alphabetization and a two-sentence summary (leaving the summary out of the copyright wouldn't help). That exclusion of the copyright law, as a I recall from when I studied it, pertains to information like what is published in phone books. Thus, Yahoo isn't violating a copyright by pulling names and phone numbers out of the phone book.
All this is moot. I never said this information was copyrighted, I just asked if there was a copyright notice in the publication from which it was drawn. Our Concerned Musician says there is not, but that doesn't really matter either, because copyright law doesn't require it. If we are going to be technical about copyright law, we'd have to say that permission to copy must be assigned in writing by the owner, whether or not notice is given.
Of course, ICSOM probably doesn't give a hoot in hell that some guy posts salaries on Tubenet, so I'm sure it doesn't matter. I was merely challenging the assumption that it wasn't copyrighted.
And that wasn't my real issue, and I only devoted one sentence to it. My real issue is that when people start comparing their "deal" with the "deal" made by others, they run a big risk of tangling themselves up in all sorts of unproductive thinking.
Rick "just finishing two chapters of a textbook that included tables of raw factual information, the use of which required permission" Denney