МІЖНАРОДНО-ПРАВОВИЙ ЗАХИСТ БАЗ ДАНИХ: ЮРИДИКО-ТЕХНІЧНИЙ АНАЛІЗ
Authors: Kosovych Vitaliy 
Published: January 2025

The article provides a legal and technical analysis of Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council “On the Legal Protection of Databases” dated March 11, 1996, which is the subject of implementation into the domestic practice of legal regulation of such a component of copyright law as the right to protect databases. The author evaluates this international act in terms of compliance with the requirements of the legislative drafting technique. It is established that the Directive has its own legal and technical features, in particular, a generally acceptable level of precision in defining legal terms and establishing the main parameters of temporal applicability.
Attention is drawn to the somewhat excessive use of evaluative concepts in the provisions of the Directive. The use of such concepts creates broad opportunities for national lawmaking and law enforcement, which is positive in a certain way, but also poses the risk of unjustified subjectivity. The author proposes a set of rules for operating with the evaluative provisions of the Directive and the Law of Ukraine “On Copyright and Related Rights” to ensure the most comprehensive legal protection of databases, namely:
– to prevent excessive use of the same evaluative concepts in the national law provisions. A particular concern in this regard is part 8, Article 21 of the Law of Ukraine No. 2811-IX “On Copyright and Related Rights” dated 1 December 2022;
– national legislation should generally implement these evaluative concepts found in international acts (in our case, the Directive). Understanding of the content of provisions with evaluative concepts in the process of their application and law enforcement interpretation of evaluative concepts should be in line with international legal practice;
– in cases where the regulation of somewhat identical legal relations is governed by different normative legal provisions, the use of evaluative concepts, in our opinion, should be standardized. In this context, the question arises regarding the evaluative concepts in part 4, Article 21 of the Law “qualitatively and/or quantitatively significant contribution” and part 8 of this Article “a substantial contribution, defined qualitatively and quantitatively”. Do the terms “significant” and “substantial” carry the same or different meanings?
– the interpretation and application of evaluative concepts contained in the legal norms defining the legal status of databases in the Law should generally align with the practice of interpretation and application of similar evaluative concepts used in civil and copyright law in particular;
– socially significant components, as provided by the evaluative concepts in the Law, should be interpreted and applied in accordance with the existing knowledge of them in legal theory and practice;
– the understanding of the evaluative concepts of the Law should align with its perception and vision of the society, as well as correspond to the legal consciousness of the subjects of law.
The author points out the need for additional study of the Directive’s compliance with the legal and technical requirements for the quality of legal acts, as set out in the recommendations of the EU bodies.
Keywords: Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council “On the Legal Protection of Databases” of March 11, 1996; legal drafting technique, copyright law, Law of Ukraine “On Copyright and Related Rights”.