A code is not an artistic expression and so can't be copyrightable. The layout of a book of codes, for sure, but the information in it... might be protectable with other IPR but not copyright.
Does not stop people threatening you though.
This is my opinion only, not legal advice, and does not relate to my employment.
Databases are generally protected by copyright law as compilations. Under the Copyright Act, a compilation is defined as a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 17. U.S.C. § 101. The preexisting materials or data may be protected by copyright, or may be unprotectable facts or ideas (see the BitLaw discussion on unprotected ideas for more information).
(I did not use AI, but this appeared at the top of my search and I think the search engine used AI to generate it):
In the European Union, databases are protected under the Database Directive, which provides legal protection based on the originality of the selection or arrangement of their contents...Some countries offer additional protections for databases that do not meet the originality requirement, often through sui generis rights.
That means the organization and selection of data is copyrightable, and only if they are creative. If you write your own tags for the codes, and makes a compilation of them all, none of that will cover your database.
Also, I think the bitlaw interpretation is incorrect. “Sweat of the brow” doesn’t magically produce copyright protection, and they don’t mention that.
Taking their example, if you had a collections from quotes from presidents, and I got a bunch of similar collections, then made my own ultimate definitive collection based partially on your list, then there’s very little chance I’d be liable for violating your copyright. If I copied the list and typesetting verbatim, you’d have a better case.
Also, modern rulings about LLM training (the topic of this thread) certainly mean copyrights on compilations of facts don’t survive training + inference cycles.
Judging by Judge Alsup's ruling even if the codes were copyrighted it would most likely not be copyright infringement to train on them either, and as such even if they are copyrightable and they do own copyright on them it remains beyond their abilities to forbid training on them. (Also opinion, also not legal advice, I'm also not a lawyer and sort of doubt the person I'm responding to is).
If you buy the codes, yes. If you only license them (which is what the original comment claims is the only way to get them legally), and that license explicitly forbids training, that seems to be less clear-cut. I have no idea if such restrictions are legal or would hold up to challenge, but it's less clear than the case where you buy a book and can then do whatever you want with it.
My software is definitely not artistic expression. I signed over the rights to the software to my employer. These statements are not codependent in any way.
Copyright under US law does not require "artistic expression". One of the requirements is called "creativity", but it's very easy to meet. The key phrase is literally "some minimal degree of creativity".
The fundamental policy choice was to protect computer software under intellectual property law, with exclusive rights and market compensation. There were a number of ways that could have been done. Other jurisdictions toyed with new, software-specific laws. But in the end the call in the US was to bring it under existing copyright law with some tweaks to definitions and a small handful of software-specific rules.
A code in this sense is something different. It's a shorthand for a longer description of an object. It'd be like a hotel copyrighting the relationship between a room number and its physical location within the building, or copyrighting resistor colors.
In the US copyright just requires a level of originality. The bar isn't very high, but for example simple logos, like IBMs blue lines logo is not copyrightable.
There are examples of software code that is probably not copyrightable, but that's limited to very simple code that has only obvious implementations.
Our role as programmers being closer to artists than engineers does not make code closer to paintings than bridges. We do have highly repeatable patterns. Nearly every program can be essentially boiled down to some subset of CRUD + tranformation.
Even if it is art (I'm not convinced), the recent artificial scarcity on art is absurd. Some other thoughts to consider:
The work I know of, I'm not in USA only have an interest in copyright laws in general, is Feist v Rural Telephone (1991) -- which appears to mirror codes for health procedures quite closely; but not exactly.
There's old but more recent law from Practice Management v AMA (1997) supporting that AMA's codes can't be copyrightable as they're part of legislation.
Berne's Art 2(8), to which USA are signed, related to non-copyright of facts.
I'm afraid I'm not appraised of the full situation, however.
And yet people are collectively paying $300M licensing these non-copyrightable codes? With that kind of money somebody must have looked into not paying for licensing
I’m sure it’s crossed the mind of many people in the industry. But it’s a comprehensive taxonomy of all diseases, medical conditions, causes, procedures and treatments. Starting from scratch would be much more expensive than just paying the licensing.
Here in California, Senate Bill 478 bans many junk fees, such as the mandatory "service fee" to buy a concert ticket. It's a stretch, but I could see an argument that if hospitals use a billing system that's incomprehensible without licensing an expensive codex, then the hospital is on the hook to provide the codex to you.
In that case its probably cheaper for most organisations just to pay the license fees than risk paying legal fees which would probably be more, even if they won.
Does not stop people threatening you though.
This is my opinion only, not legal advice, and does not relate to my employment.