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European Law in Databases

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Intellectual Property; License

Definition

European law provides three types of legal rights to database owners to control copying: (i) copyright law, (ii) the right to impose contracts or licenses on users, and (iii) a unique statutory right applicable to the non-copyrightable information – such as factual data – in European databases. This entry discusses only the third of these rights. This stand-alone or “sui generis” database right gives a database owner a claim against one who extracts or reuses the whole or a substantial part of the database contents, where “substantial part” is evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively.

Historical Background

Prior to 1996, the legal treatment of databases in Europe varied in the requirements for copyright protection. In 1992, the European Commission proposed that EU copyright law be harmonized with US law by requiring originality for copyright protection to apply. However, the European Commission also proposed that a separate legal...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Comments on future of the Directive. http://circa.europa.eu/Public/irc/markt/markt_consultations/library?l=/copyright_neighbouring/database_consultation&vm=detailed&sb=Title

  2. Commission of the European Communities, First evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, 12 Dec. 2005, at http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/databases/evaluation_report_en.pdf

  3. Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, OJ L 77, 27.3.1996, pp. 20–28. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexapi!prod!CELEXnumdoc&lg=en&numdoc=31996L0009&model= guichett

  4. Gervais, D.J. The Protection of Databases (2007): Chicago-Kent Law Review, 82:1109–1168, 2007 available at http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=daniel_gervais.

  5. Judgments of the European Court of Justice in respect of the Database Directive, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/prot-databases/jurisprudence_en.htm

  6. Maurer, S.M. Across Two Worlds: Database Protection in the United States and Europe, In Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Knowledge–Based Economy, 2001. http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/vwapj/13-EN2%20Maurer.pdf/$file/13-EN2%20Maurer.pdf

  7. Maurer, S.M., Hugenholtz, B.P., and Onsrud, Harlan J. Europe’s Database Experiment, Science 2001, 294(5543):789–790, 2001.

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  8. Overview of official documents. http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/prot-databases/prot-databases_en.htm

  9. Study on the Implementation and Application of Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases conducted by NautaDulith. http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/databases/etd2001b53001e72_en.pdf

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

    Michael Carroll

Authors
  1. Michael Carroll
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Carroll, M. (2009). European Law in Databases. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1519

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