Source: http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/professional/collection_law.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 10:36:29+00:00

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The following article was first published, in a shortened version, in the February 2000 issue of the journal Copyright World. It has also appeared in Computer Law Reporter, Vol. 31, Number 1, March 2000, and Internet Law and Business, Vol. 1, Number 5, March 2000.
The 1990s have witnessed the creation of an entire new category of intellectual property—the collection—as well as a new (sui generis) right of ownership. In this article I will try to summarize the issues that content providers and their representatives should be alert to when dealing with laws concerning “collections of information”, a term I will use interchangeably with the term databases.
To understand the importance of this issue, you must sense how deeply collections of information have penetrated the life of economically advanced cultures. This morning, you may have flipped through a listing of television channels to find one where you could check the weather for your region; you may have grabbed a bus schedule on the way to your office and (if you are calorie-conscious like many Americans) peeked into a book that rates food’s nutritional value before choosing a breakfast item from a restaurant menu; you may then have settled into your computer and called up a database of statistics critical to your profession. Not only the statistical database, but also the TV guide, the weather listing, the bus schedule, the nutrition book, and the restaurant menu are all collections of information.
The EC Databases Directive1 defines a protected collection as “a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means” (Article 1, paragraph 2). One current U.S. Congressional bill (H.R. 354) calls it “information that has been collected and has been organized for the purpose of bringing discrete items of information together in one place or through one source so that persons may access them.” Both definitions are very broad, being drawn up to exclude only individual works covered by copyright.2 And with so many databases offered over the Internet for easy searching and retrieval, we have become a society awash in collections of information.
My own perspective on intellectual property encompasses the roles of both consumer and producer. I work as an editor at the major computer book publisher, O’Reilly & Associates (but this article expresses solely my own opinions). I am not a lawyer, although during the course of writing this article I have consulted more lawyers than you would wish to gather around a single table. For the past five years I have also intensively researched many policy issues related to information creation and use for a public-interest group I volunteer for, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
I feel that the first concern of content providers is the scope and purpose of protection laws; therefore I have ignored such details as enforcement and transition periods. Furthermore, I have concentrated on U.S. legislation because that is where I have the richest sources, but I have been able to indicate broadly the scope of European law.
Database manufacturers base their call for a new right on purely economic grounds, unlike existing forms of intellectual property that are grounded philosophically on the promotion of creativity, or “moral rights” in the European tradition. An author tends to maintain the copyright on a creative work even when he or she receives no remuneration for it (as in the case of this article) simply so other people won’t change it and ship it around in garbled form. But database manufacturers have little reason to be concerned about how people use facts from the collections unless the manufacturers’ markets are threatened.
Due to the economic basis for protection, the EC Directive and related laws call for penalties only where the original manufacturer has made a “substantial investment” in the database. Furthermore, the manufacturer must show that copying has harmed its market (to which the proposed U.S. legislation adds “potential markets”). On the other hand, the economic basis suggests that, to uphold the public interest, regulators and courts should balance database protection with an insistence on fair licensing and other promotion for competition.
There is practically no research that would bolster the economic argument for special database protection law. Since the database industry is growing rapidly and enjoying strong profits, no one convincingly demonstrates that it is harmed by the lack of special laws. Instead, justification for a sui generis right is usually limited to statements that seem obvious and require no defense.
Collections made through a substantial investment deserve protection from copying.
Technological change facilitates free-loading (the resale of information that another entity has paid to collect).
New rights for collection makers will improve their markets and rates of return.
Even in Europe, where proponents have succeeded in passing a database right into law, it is worth re-examining these foundations in order to understand where courts should limit the right.
Modern opportunities for value-added databases—also known as “transformative uses5”—heighten the risks of protecting existing investment. Astounding amounts of new value can be created by “reformatting, filtering, and hot-linking”6 data from various sites. Sometimes, perhaps, restrictions on copying can encourage different database creators to share data that would otherwise remain secret—for instance, when realtors combine their listings7—not only because they are guaranteed license fees, but because they can prevent misuse of private information. But such a listing doesn’t require database protection; trade secrets and contracts should be adequate. Courts should be alert in balancing the manufacturer’s right to a market or “potential market” with the value of new products from second comers.
Because a huge amount of data can be copied from an electronic medium or an Internet site in the blink of an eye, database manufacturers argue that copying will become ubiquitous in the absence of laws. True, devices that make CD-ROMs can now be bought for a few hundred dollars. But copying a CD-ROM is copyright infringement, because the expression as well as the data is being reproduced.
Both Peters10 and a statement by Tyson and Sherry11 warn that inadequate legal protection may discourage manufacturers from offering their wares in “convenient” formats such as CD-ROM. Both were writing before the advent of high-bandwidth data telecommunications, which are gradually decreasing in price throughout the technologically advanced world and which make online access much more attractive than before. The possibility that the Internet (where data can be updated instantly) will nearly eliminate disks as the medium of choice shows the risks of making laws in a technologically fast-moving field. On the Internet, a server can detect enormous amounts of copying from a single user and block access to that user.
Digital watermarks and digital signatures can harm privacy by tracking and preserving information on users’ habits.
In an ideal world, the balance between measures protecting manufacturers and measures promoting competition would give manufacturers the resources they need to develop new products, while leaving alive the incentive to develop them before competitors grab market share. In the real world, greed erects legal measures that reward sloth. It is all too easy for protected manufacturers to keep prices high and use a legal club to hold back competition. The results would be not only less research and less innovation, but also less utilization of the service because it is overpriced and underfeatured. Manufacturers may end up hogging pieces of a small pie when they could have enjoyed a much bigger one.
Since all sides agree that data is the lifeblood of modern society, legislators and courts must carefully balance the incentives to produce databases (such as protection) with the freedom to use data in new ways and create value-added or transformative products. Policy decisions must rest partly on how often competitors can reasonably be expected to regenerate the original data on their own.
Proponents and critics of database protection disagree about how widespread monopoly (“sole-source”) databases are. Reichman and Samuelson cite high start-up costs, difficulty differentiating a new entrant from a well-known established provider, the inability of niche markets to support multiple vendors, and other barriers to entry.16 I would add to this list the situations where an organization generates data for internal use, funding it to benefit other projects, and then offers the data to the public as an ancillary source of revenue. For instance, the American Medical Association (which testified in support of data protection) maintains a Physician’s Masterfile containing “demographic, educational, certification, licensure, and current practice information for over 800,000 active U.S. doctors of medicine (MDs) and over 90% of the doctors of osteopathic medicine (Dos), including members and nonmembers alike”17 which they obviously can use for numerous organizational purposes. While the facts are by no means secret, no other organization could conceivably reach and query all the same physicians in order to build up a competing database.
Arguing the other side of the question, Tyson and Sherry claim that, where no artificial monopoly exists, competition will naturally arise to keep any one company from charging too much or refusing outright to license data.18 This argument seems to assume perfect markets in a classical economic sense.
A frequent proposal by those trying to temper protection laws—and even some in favor of such laws, such as Ginsburg in a relatively early 1992 publication19—is to require compulsory licensing for databases, carried out through arbitration or rates pre-set by law.20 While this may risk bringing bureaucracy into a fast-moving technological field, the principle has popped up repeatedly in many contexts. Thus, the first proposal for an EC Directive (April 15, 1992) required “fair licensing” for sole-source databases. The final Directive, however, steered away from such direct intervention and simply said a “right must not be used in such a way as to facilitate abuses of a dominant position.”21 Note that “a dominant position” is not necessarily limited to a sole-source provider. Since licensing is not regulated, the lesson I draw from the discussions is that courts must apply anti-monopoly and pro-competition laws vigilantly to prevent abuse of database law.
All authors admit that, to some extent, data produced under government auspices should be exempt from protection, because a sole-source situation is created by definition. Many commentators in the U.S. (including several members of the Clinton Administration) insisted that the exclusion extend to anything produced by federal government funding or even “within the scope of” a federal agency; consequently, this strong exemption appears in the current versions of both U.S. bills.
The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Feist Publishing, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.,23 established that mere “sweat of the brow” did not endow collections of information with copyright protection. Instead, “creativity in selection or arrangement” was required. Later cases have gone to great length to interpret those words. The case of Feist was fairly stark because Rural Telephone’s “selection” included all customers and their “arrangement” was a standard alphabetical listing. The defendant, Feist, needed to copy the data in order to put out a unified telephone listing covering several companies; Rural Telephone refused to license the data while the other companies had cooperated.
Countries vary in how much originality is required for traditional copyright protection on collections. Rees, for instance, says that “the standard of originality in UK law is considerably lower than the standard required in many other EU countries, notably Germany.”31 In his opinion, copyright is not limited to expression, but to an “elaboration or aggregation of information” once it is set out in an “original work”.32 A later passage in the book adds that “since early nineteenth century, UK law” has protected works that are “original” in the sense that “sufficient skill, labor, or experience must have been applied in the production of the work.”33 The word “original” here is clearly different from its use in the U.S. Feist ruling because no “creative spark” is required.
Because of Feist’s historical centrality, I cannot bring myself to leave it behind without pointing out what a poor poster child Rural Telephone makes for the proponents of database protection. Were the Feist case brought up again today under current database laws, Rural Telephone would lose again.
First, Rural Telephone fails the “substantial investment” clause; it does not require much sweat of the brow to record the telephone number assigned to each customer who signs up for service.
Second, Rural Telephone possessed its listing because of government protection as a monopoly telephone company. The EC Directive and database laws exclude government data, although the Directive is much less clear than the proposed U.S. legislation in defining government data. Whether or not a court might interpret the “exclusively licensed by” government exclusion to cover the activities of a telephone company, it was the government that gave Rural Telephone an exclusive right to gather the information Feist needed.
Third, Rural Telephone was preventing both competition and innovation, deliberately refusing to license the data in order to hold back a value-added product. As several commentators have pointed out, Feist was no free rider. And all sides on the database protection question agree that it must be balanced by anti-competitive regulation, supported by court action.
The model for anti-competitive actions in data is the cases brought against the publisher Magill in Ireland by three major television broadcasters.35 Magill TV Guide Ltd published a comprehensive directory of television programs available to Irish viewers, taking its data from the three broadcasters’ listings. Sued by all three, it was forced to stop publication by an Irish court. Magill took the cases to the EC, which ruled that Article 86 of the EC Treaty provided an exemption from the usual copyright laws because the broadcasters were abusing “a dominant position.” They also praised Magill for its added value in publishing “a new product in the form of a multi-channel guide”. While settled in the public interest, these cases raise the chilling question: would Magill be able to win today in the face of database protection laws? And even if it could, how would a small researcher or innovative start-up firm marshal the resources to take a case all the way to the EC?
The few cases after Feist in the U.S. that offer precedents for database protection tend to show that new laws are unnecessary. In Key Publications, Inc. v. Chinatown Today Publishing Enterprises, Inc.,38 Kregos v. Associated Press,39 and Bellsouth Advertising & Publishing Corporation v. Donnelley Information Publishing, Inc.40 the collections were all held to be under copyright protection. (National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc.41 is irrelevant to the discussion because the defendant discovered its data independently from the plaintiff.) One could argue in response, perhaps, that Feist discouraged many manufacturers from suing.
The most disturbing post-Feist case is Warren Publishing, Inc. v. Microdos Data Corporation,42 which dangled back and forth in the courts, but where the court finally ruled (with three dissenters) that cable listings were not original enough to deserve protection. One lawyer critical of database protection laws argues that the court simply made a mistake.43 A representative of technology companies further points out that Warren could have taken action under the doctrine of misappropriation, but brought defeat on itself by its failure to do so.44 My own reading of Warren suggests a very confused court majority that thought that Warren’s choices displayed creativity in the “discovery of facts” rather than creativity in arrangement. As nerve-racking as it may be for a database manufacturer to watch millions of dollars of investment turn on a phrase, this case is not enough to show the need for a whole new property right. And now that the principle of originality is clear, it should be trivial for database manufacturers to make sure that some “spark” of originality is included in their products.
The first proposal for an EC Directive protected all non-commercial users by saying that “unfair extraction” was defined only in the context of commercial use.51 Stripping out such protection, however, the final Directive instead inserted an exemption in Article 6, paragraph 2(b) for “teaching and scientific research”. The clause was weakened by being made optional, and if national laws include it, it must apply only to non-commercial use.
The EC Directive does not protect explicitly against independent discovery of the facts in an existing database. The U.S. bills, by contrast, include a paragraph protecting the “gathering or use of information obtained by other means”.
How much copying is to be considered infringement? Proponents of legislation insist there is no hard and fast lower limit.53 The EC Directive criminalizes any reproduction, “in whole or in part.”54 One U.S. bill, H.R. 354, softens this almost Levitican insistence on purity by using the word “substantial” to modify copying: database protection extends to “substantial” portions of the database as well as to copying the whole. But U.S. commentators state that “substantial” must be considered qualitatively as well as quantitatively, and there is no clear minimum amount of copying that can be defined as “substantial”.55 The result of such reasoning is that users extracting information have no guidelines at all as to how much is too much, as interpreted by a court.
The EC Directive on the Legal Protection of Databases was passed on March 11, 1996 with an implementation deadline of January 1, 1998. According to Band,56 12 members of the EC have passed laws to comply with the Directive, and the other 3 are being sued to force compliance. The Directive includes a reciprocity clause that tries to force other countries to pass similar laws by threatening to favor EC companies over outsiders whose countries lack database protection.
Flush with success at the EC, database vendors persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives to consider a database protection law and got the U.S. delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization to propose an international treaty. Database protection has foundered on both fronts, however. WIPO refused to take action on a U.S. proposal after informational meetings in 1996 and has never taken up the issue since. That the pre-eminent organization defining intellectual property was satisfied to leave database protection at the existing level, refusing to pass EC-style protection, should leave grave suspicions in the minds of content providers concerning database protection laws. Critics ascribe the failure in both WIPO and the U.S. to the increased consciousness and organization of the research, computing, library, and public-interest communities, along with technology providers.
Furthermore, other countries outside the EC are slow to respond to the reciprocity clause. Some Latin American countries have passed laws.57 But Reichman58 states that Japan has chosen to extend unfair competition law instead. According to Prue Adler59 of the Association of Research Libraries, many underdeveloped countries opposed the draft WIPO database treaty because the industrialized world’s existing investment in collections would put it in a significantly advantageous position.
Critics of database protection in the U.S. see the reciprocity clause as something of a paper tiger, because collections can be organized to meet copyright criteria and be protected under standard copyright law.
The U.S. Congress has considered no less than four versions of a “collections of information antipiracy act” during the past four years; H.R. 354 is the current version. To the credit of its sponsors, they have progressively tempered it to meet criticism, often incorporating the suggested wording of its critics verbatim. They have moved in the reverse direction of the EC, starting with a sui generis right and moving closer to a combination of unfair competition and misappropriation.60 Recently an alternative to H.R. 354 has been introduced: the “Consumer and Investor Access to Information Act”, H.R. 1858.
If a repackaging of the data can be considered a new market, its copying is safe from the type of database protection set up by the EC Directive. But the U.S. bill H.R. 354 adds “potential markets” (a phrase with precedent in copyright law61) as areas where a database manufacturer can prohibit copying. Thus, a database manufacturer can prohibit a competitor from copying data by showing the court that it is preparing to provide products to the competitor’s market—not a comparable product, perhaps, but just another product which the competitor might cause customers not to buy.
The “potential market” phrase, which was originally left undefined, gave manufacturers the right to stop innovation simply by saying, “Oh, yeah, we could do that if we wanted.” Current wording requires the manufacturer to “reasonably expect to derive revenue, directly or indirectly” from the potential market, or to have taken “taken demonstrable steps to offer in commerce within a short period of time a product or service”. The loopholes left by these definitions do not offer much assurance to competitors. H.R. 1858 is far preferable because it considers a copy to be infringing only if it is a “duplicate” of the original, defined as “substantially the same”. Thus, value-added and transformational uses are protected. Furthermore, H.R. 1858 defines two criteria that must both be met before the bill applies: that the copy “displaces substantial sales or licenses” of the original and that the copy “significantly threatens the opportunity to recover a return on the investment” of the original.
illustration, explanation, example, comment, criticism, teaching, research, or analysis—but only “if it is reasonable under the circumstances.” Several clauses follow that try to define what is “reasonable,” but it would take too long to dissect them here.
nonprofit educational, scientific, or research purposes—but only if it “does not materially harm the primary market for the product or service”, a clause that effectively removes the protection just granted.
news reporting—this time with no qualifications to weaken the exemption.
genealogical information for nonprofit purposes.
government collections—a broad clause including contractors and any one funded by the government or working under the “scope” of the government (with small exceptions).
computer programs—a complex clause that may leave loopholes, but is supposed to limit protection to the contents of the database rather than the process of accessing it.
digital online communications—a very specific exception for databases used in routing and other networking functions.
H.R. 1858 provides much more safety for copying for research purposes, protecting it “so long as such conduct is not part of a consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct commercial competition”. It also includes exemptions for government information and computer programs.
I have shown that the case history suggesting the need for database protections laws is just as “thin” as the constitutional protection cited by the Supreme Court for databases. But I have found two hypothetical examples cited by supporters of protection for collections. In particularly, they are brought out to support the contention that, while everyone agrees the amount of copying must be “substantial” before it can be called infringing, there is no way to specify a minimum amount that triggers the “substantial” clause and consequent legal penalties of H.R. 354. But the hypothetical examples raise other important questions about database protection as well.
The House committee cites this hypothetical example to show importance of prohibiting partial extractions of databases. But the example shows even more the importance of maintaining competition, and of keeping up the pressure on the original manufacturer to expand offerings, in order to improve the quality of life and the public availability of critical information. If “Drugs Every Consumer Should Know” would be of interest to ordinary consumers, and if the publisher of the PDR has not written it already, I think that reuse of the data by a competitor (whether copied from the PDR or assembled from the original manufacturers) would be a marvelous idea.
The collections of restaurant listings I’ve seen usually show originality in arrangement, which ought to qualify them for copyright protection. If the restaurants were listed by city, county, or postal code, to be sure, there would be no originality. But many listings use more vaguely defined geographical breakdowns that are useful to both residents and tourists, such as “Historic Section” or “Riverside District”. Unless such areas are formally defined, they represent choices that can be used in court to justify copyright protection.
This example again shows that computers and the Internet make possible an infinite variety of organizations for the same data to serve different users in different ways. If extracting a geographically limited set of restaurant data and including it in a larger listing (say, along with stores and museum) hurts the market for the original collector of information, that is completely the fault of the original collector for failing to exploit an opportunity. The definitions of H.R. 1858 protect competition. The “potential market” definition in H.R. 354, while suppressing the competitor who copies data, is supposed to assure that the public will get the service soon from the original collector, but it is uncomfortably broad.
I have given the database protection proponents their shot at justifying new laws; I now have the right to hypothesize in order to show the risks of such laws.
A first hypothetical example is based on a real-life case involving Web sites that offer online auctions. Two such sites, AuctionWatch.com and Bidder’s Edge, allow people to find the best possible deals by searching for items through multiple auction sites—in other words, AuctionWatch.com and Bidder’s Edge translate a user’s search into a search on each competing site, combine the results of those sites, and present the user with Web links to all matching items. The added value (combining information from multiple competitors) precisely parallels both the Feist case and the Magill case, where courts upheld the right to copy material in order to produce a combined listing.
The best-known Web auction site, eBay, complained repeatedly about AuctionWatch.com’s and Bidder’s Edge’s display of its listings, and finally in November 1999 sued Bidder’s Edge. Because the courts have not resolved the copyright status of links to Web sites, it is hard to predict the outcome. People technically well versed in Web technology tend to see links as references, and therefore subject to the fair use exemption. But in the disturbing Shetland Times case, the court ruled that unauthorized linking was infringing. Related U.S. cases were settled out of court on vague grounds where the linking site paid a license fee to the site where the page resided.
A future Ebay/ Bidder’s Edge case might exploit database law to claim that a combined listing from multiple sites is an infringing copy of data. The state of disorganization in laws regarding the Web suggests an additional danger. A user must download data from a Web site to his or her own computer in order to view it, and this temporary downloading has been considered a “copy” by several courts. (And there is some justification for the rulings, because anything loaded into temporary computer memory can easily be stored permanently.) A future eBay-type plaintiff might claim that anyone approaching its site through a combined listing on another site is “unlawful” under the scope of the EC directive. Not only that, but the site creating the link has engaged in contributory infringement. (I hope that I have not suggested a course of action to any unscrupulous lawyers.) If viewed favorably by the courts, such definitions could bring the innovative services for which the Web is so famous to a screeching halt.
Another hypothetical example returns to the incredible power of computers and the Internet to create new value by “reformatting, filtering, and hot-linking” existing data.
Suppose that a chemical firm releases databases listing the concentrations of various chemicals in the soil and water of many communities. A medical firm lists various diseases broken down by community. A third firm extracts data from the chemical and medical sites to produce detailed reports correlating chemical contamination with concentrations of disease.
While the public benefit of such a project goes without saying, both H.R. 354 and a database protection law conforming to the EC directive would allow either the chemical site or the medical site to quash the reports. Under H.R. 354, the site would have to make the claim that they were planning to offer similar reports soon, or that people buying the third firm’s report would otherwise buy the original databases. But the chilling effect of the bill might prevent anyone from trying to offer a new service in the first place.
A sui generis right to collections of information is now embodied in law throughout the European Community. The United States has held off from passing such a law for three years, and may still choose among three alternatives: maintaining the status quo, passing H.R. 1858 with its strictly limited injunction against “duplicates”, or passing H.R. 354, which is philosophically similar to the EC Directive but includes more exemptions to protect competition and the public interest.
Every content provider is also a content consumer. My own field, technical book publication, is like maple syrup production near my home in New England: you need 50 liters of sap from the tree to make a single liter of syrup. Even a highly creative offering like a motion picture or a novel requires an enormous amount of research. Thus, companies in a content production industry should worry more about the free flow of source material than in building fences around their products. They should study database protection laws and the defenses against them, particularly defenses based on competition. In this way they hopefully can balance protection for the liter of maple syrup they produced this Spring with their ability to tap another 50 liters of maple tree sap next Winter.
I would like to thank Prue Adler, Jonathan Band, Nicholas Bohm, and Susan Singleton for answering my questions, and Prue Adler, Jonathan Band, and Karen Coyle for reviewing a draft of this paper. I take responsibility for any errors. Finally, I must thank the New England School of Law, a small private institution, for allowing the public into their library, where I performed the research without which I could not have written the paper. Their staff took a sincere interest in my project and spent a good deal of time digging up source material for me. Libraries stand as the great inspirations for those of us who believe in the open dissemination of information to the public.
Andrew Oram works as an editor at O’Reilly & Associates, a major publisher of computer books, software, and services of interest to computer users. He also used to follow issues of Internet policy for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His policy-related publications are available at http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/professional/article.html and this paper is at http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/professional/collection_law.html. He once participated in the making of maple syrup when he accompanied his children on an educational excursion. The opinions in this paper are his alone.
3 Gordon, Wendy J., On Owning Information: Intellectual Property and the Restitutionary Impulse, 78 Virginia Law Review 149-281, 1992.
4 J.H. Reichman and Pamela Samuelson, Intellectual Property Rights in Data?, Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 51-166., p.121.
6 J.H. Reichman and Pamela Samuelson, op. cit., p. 125.
8 Lessig, Lawrence, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books, New York, NY. 1999.
9 Ginsburg, Jane C., Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 90, No. 6, pp. 1865-1938, 1990, p. 1893.
13 See, for instance, Tyson and Sherry, op. cit.
14 Ginsburg, op. cit., p. 1921.
15 Brazell, Lorna, Limitations and Exceptions, in Rees, Christopher, and Chalton, Simon, eds., Database Law, Jordans Publishing Ltd, 1998, pp. 74-75.
16 Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., p. 94.
18 Tyson and Sherry, op. cit.
19 Ginsburg, Jane C., No “Sweat”? Copyright and Other Protection of Works of Information After Feist v. Rural Telephone, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 92, pp. 338-388, 1992, p. 1918.
20 For example, see Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., or Lederberg, op. cit.
21 Chalton, Simon, EU Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases, in Rees, op. cit., p. 19.
22 For instance, see Chalton, Simon, EU Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases, in Rees, op. cit., p. 23, Rees, Christopher, Database Right, p.66 in the same work, Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., p. 90.
23 Feist Publishing, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 US 340 (1991).
24 See, for instance, Tyson and Sherry, op. cit.
27 Ginsburg, Jane C., Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information, op. cit., p. 1878.
28 Sheils, Paul T., and Porchina, Robert, What’s All the Fuss About Feist? The Sky is Not Falling on the Intellectual Property Rights of Online Database Proprietors, 17 Univ. Dayton Law Review, 563-585 (Winter 1992), p. 585.
29 Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., p. 74.
30 Chalton, Simon, EU Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases, in Rees, op. cit., p. 17.
31 Rees, Christopher, Information and the Law, in Rees, op. cit., p. 6.
32 Rees, op. cit., p. 7.
33 Chalton, Simon, Copyright in Databases and Other Compilations, in Rees, op. cit., p. 73.
34 Chalton, Simon, EU Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases, in Rees, op. cit.
35 Radio Telefis Eireann v. Commission of the European Communities, Case T-69/89  ECR, The British Broadcasting Corporation and BBC Enterprises Ltd v. Commission of the European Communities, Case T-69/89  ECR, and Independent Television Publications Limited v. Commission of the European Communities, Case T-76/89  ECR, Case T-69/89  ECR, all published in Reports 1991-7/II.
36 Trevor Cook, Licensing and Enforcement, in Rees, op. cit., p. 90-91.
37 Trevor Cook, op. cit., p. 120.
45 Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., p. 84.
46 Gordon, Wendy J., op cit.
47 Ginsburg, No "Sweat"?, op. cit., p. 367.
49 Rees, Christopher, Database Right, in Rees, op. cit., p. 64.
50 Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
51 Chalton, Simon, EU Directive 96/9/EC on the Legal Protection of Databases, in Rees, op. cit., p. 21.
53 For instance, see Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights, before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on H.R. 2652, October 23, 1997, op. cit.
54 Chalton, Simon, Copyright in Databases and Other Compilations, in Rees, op. cit., pp. 55-56.
55 Statement of Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights, before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on H.R. 2652, October 23, 1997, op. cit.
58 Statement concerning H.R. 2652 before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., October 23, 1997 by J.H. Reichman, op. cit.
60 Statement of Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights, before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on H.R. 354, March 18, 1999, op. cit. See also Lederberg, op. cit.
61 Statement of Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights, before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on H.R. 2652, October 23, 1997, op. cit.
62 Statement of Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyrights, before the House Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on H.R. 354, March 18, 1999, op. cit.
66 Tyson and Sherry, op. cit.
67 Reichman and Samuelson, op. cit., p. 125.

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