Source: https://stantoniplaw.com/2017/05/european-union-database-directive/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 22:11:36+00:00

Document:
The passing of the EU Database Directive signified an important change for Europe. If nothing else, it helped establish the intentions of Europe to be competitive on a global stage within the Information Technology sector. On March 11, 1996 the European Union officially adopted the Database Directive.[i] All Member States were obligated to implement the Directive by January 1, 1998.[ii] Ultimately the objective was to harmonize copyright protection across the EU and set standards for originality, exclusive rights and exceptions to them.
There were many iterations of the Directive that started to take form around 1988 and over the next 8 years it evolved from being unsure about the need and no support for sui generis rights, to a position that it was necessary for the competitiveness of Europe. This evolution occurred due to global market forces, particularly the United States, and the desire to protect the investment into technology within Europe. This led to the final adopted directive which includes copyright protection for database structure and sui generis rights for database content, regardless of originality.
The biggest change came in the form of a sui generis right that protects a “substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents” regardless of whether or not they can be copyrighted.[v] This also prevents others from extracting or re-utilizing the database in whole or a substantial part of the contents. Insubstantial parts of the contents are not covered and cannot be included even through contractual means.
Since the Directive’s implementation, there have been a few court cases that have exposed some confusion in the language. “Substantial investment” is probably the most confusing for courts, but discussions about what actually is a database and who is the database maker has drawn debates as well.
This ruling was interesting because it sort of undercut the broad protection that sui generis rights give to the database creator. The courts clarified the substantial investment to mean that it has to be an investment in verifying and collecting the data that is used, not just investing in the creation of a database filled with, independent unverified by the author, data.
[i] Council Directive 96/9, Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 O.J. (L 77/20) (EC).
[ii] Database Directive, at art. 1.6.
[iii] Database Directive, at art. 3(1).
[iv] Database Directive, at art. 5.
[v] Database Directive, at art. 7(1).
[vi] Database Directive, at art. 9(a)-(c).
[vii] Database Directive, at art. 10(3).
[viii] Database Directive, at art. 11(1).
[ix] Database Directive, at art. 11(3).
[x] British Horseracing Bd. Ltd. v. William Hill Org. Ltd., 2004 E.C.R. I-10415.

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