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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

I am not generally a fan of heavy handed regulations but the government needs to step in and shut Equifax down right now. Literally pull the plug on everything they own.

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Updating James Madison:

If everyone were honest, neither greedy nor malicious, did pay attention, were competent, including securing their apps, and didn’t have either fires, floods or roads, no regulation or government would be necessary.

I think we should still strive to move towards being that way. Greed and maliciousness breed greed and maliciousness and it’s be good to root them out wherever we can.

In the absence of civil institutions regulated by the people, regulation does not disappear. The mantle is picked up by corporations. It's our choice.

I'm not sure what's worse: the fact that Equifax just got $7.25M for identity services from the IRS or the realization that the IRS just spent $7.25M on data they can get for free...

That $7.25M went to get the data of the different colour than the data they could find for free. Even when stuff is bit-for-bit identical, sadly, color matters. IRS needs to have the data painted "official", not "from a hack".

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

That's like saying "I just spent $100 on this piece of software I could have torrented"

Except data (mere facts) isn't copyrightable.

Yes they are, you can assert rights on a collection of facts that you have collected. A database containing the location of every tree in the UK would be a piece of protectable intellectual property.

This is jurisdiction-specific; the UK has a right in databases (as part of EU law) but the US has an "originality" requirement.

Or indeed, houses. E.g. postcode database.

As a reference data point, the official UK Postcode database:

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/national-statistics-postcode-loo...

Although in some jurisdictions such a right exists, it is not copyright.

The US constitution limits the restrictions on free speech caused by copyrights and patents and does not allow generic database rights systems that you find in the EU.

There isn't "intellectual property", there is copyright, utility, patents, trademarks, design patents, ship hull design rights, and a bunch of others.

What's the law that gives people in some jurisdictions exclusive rights over collected data? Is it copyright again? I ask because I would like to learn more about this law, and it's difficult to do so if I don't even know what it's called. The term "intellectual property" adds confusion towards understanding the particulars.

Btw, as an interesting bit of trivia, the lack of copyrightability of data is why we have fun things like paper towns and other copyright traps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

If they have this much trouble with security imagine what else they might be failing at unbeknownst to us.

drinking water without it dribbling out the corners of their mouths?

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