ownership of metadata
A recent legal ruling in Germany implicitly
puts the question of ownership of metadata in the limelight: in a recent
high court ruling it was decided that trademarks used as either a name
or value anywhere in html metadata fall under the protection of the copyright
and/or trademark laws.
In principle this follows current jurisprudence
in protecting domain names, but the problem is that ownership is implicitly
being claimed and supported for a definition, i.e. a lexical term its ontological
basis. This raises all sorts of problems.
Are there any similar cases in other
countries?
Mark Mattingley-Scott
S/MIME Cryptographic Signature