[Air-L] a question about privacy protection and copyright in Internet research

Dan L. Burk dburk at uci.edu
Wed May 11 13:13:31 PDT 2011


> I tend to think that; if you do not own the data, then your rights in
> regards to the data, including rights to privacy of that data, are
> curtailed and likely non-existent.

Er -- this is clearly not true in the EU member states and other countries
with strong data protection regimes.

For that matter, it's not even true under certain U.S. laws (common law
privacy, Fair Credit Reporting, PPA, COPPA, HPPA, etc., etc).

So you might need to revise that thinking a little bit.  DLB

>Te question of course then becomes
> who owns the data and who has copyright to the data because those are
> different things.

To the extent that the data constitutes factual indicia, there will be no
copyright because facts are not protectable under copyright at all.

Some types of social science "data" (e.g., ethnographies) might be the
subject of copyright.

But I agree they are two different things.

-- 
Dan L. Burk
Chancellor's of Law
University of California, Irvine
4500 Berkeley Place
Irvine, CA  92697-8000
Voice: (949) 824-9325
Fax: (949)824-7336





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