Compulsory licensing- a crowbar to open api's?

[Roderick A Gammon]

Aloha-

You may have heard about a recent case that declared freelance writer's must
be compensated when publishers expand their publishing mediums.  In
particular, freelancer's for the NY Times have to be compensated for print
articles published in digital archives.

What's interesting is that the court established a sort of 'compulsory
licensing' to keep 'holes' from appearing in the historical record, e.g.
freelance authors have to give consent to digital archiving in this case.

Full article here:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20010730_chander.html

Regarding compulsory licenses and intellectual property, the article notes
that:

"A compulsory license forces a copyright or patent owner to permit someone
else to use the work for a predetermined fee. Accordingly, it precludes the
owner from refusing to license his or her work to other people in certain,
specified circumstances. In the compulsory licensing model the Court cited,
for example, if the parties cannot agree on a royalty for a given copyright
license, then an arbitration panel would decide the rate for them.

Under the doctrine of eminent domain, the government may declare a piece of
land necessary for public use and then simply take the land — as long as it
pays the landlord a reasonable price. (If a reasonable price is not paid, a
Takings Clause suit will result.) Compulsory licensing is the eminent domain
of intellectual property. It, too, allows the state to interfere with an
individual's property as long as compensation is paid, and mandates that the
amount of compensation be determined objectively, not subjectively. That is,
even if the owner wants a higher license fee, he or she must settle for the
fee an arbitrator considers reasonable."

Any well-intentioned forecasts for how this could help a class-action suit
to force opening of closed api's?

aloha-
rod g

____________________________________________

President, AEG, Inc.     | PhD. Candidate
Tools for multi-lingual  | Chinese Computational Linguistics
information processing.  | University of HI @ Manoa
http://www.aeg-inc.net   | http://www.aeg-inc.net/cuttingEdge