Freistaat Bayern v Verlag Esterbauer GmbH.
Date: 2015-10-29
12. It must be borne in mind in that regard that the Court has held that it is in keeping with the objective pursued by the EU legislature to give the term ‘database’ as defined in Directive 96/9 a wide scope, unencumbered by considerations of a formal, technical or material nature (see judgments in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 20, and Ryanair , C‑30/14, EU:C:2015:10, paragraph 33).
14. Recital 17 in the preamble to Directive 96/9 states in that regard that the concept of database must be understood as applying to ‘literary, artistic, musical or other collections of works or collections of other material such as texts, sound, images, numbers, facts, and data’ (see judgment in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 23). It is, moreover, apparent from recital 14 in the preamble thereto that the protection granted thereunder relates both to electronic and non-electronic databases.
16. The Court has also held that, in that context of broad interpretation, the concept of ‘database’ within the meaning of Directive 96/9 is specifically defined in terms of its function (see judgment in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 27). As evidenced by recitals 9, 10 and 12 in the preamble thereto, the legal protection introduced thereby is aimed at stimulating investment in data storage and processing systems in order to contribute to the development of an information market against a background of exponential growth in the amount of information generated and processed annually in all sectors of activity (see judgments in Fixtures Marketing , C‑46/02, EU:C:2004:694, paragraph 33; The British Horseracing Board and Others , C‑203/02, EU:C:2004:695, paragraph 30; Fixtures Marketing , C‑338/02, EU:C:2004:696, paragraph 23; and Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 39).
17. Thus, classification as a ‘database’ within the meaning of Article 1(2) of Directive 96/9 is dependent, first of all, on the existence of a collection of ‘independent materials’, that is to say, materials which are separable from one another without their informative, literary, artistic, musical or other value being affected (see judgment in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 29).
20. It is settled case-law, first of all, that not only an individual piece of information, but also a combination of pieces of information can constitute ‘independent material’ within the meaning of Article 1(2) of Directive 96/9 (see judgments in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 35, and also Football Dataco and Others , C‑604/10, EU:C:2012:115, paragraph 26).
22. Secondly, the Court has held that the informative value of material from a collection is not affected within the meaning of that case-law if it has autonomous informative value after being extracted from the collection concerned (see judgments in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 33, and Football Dataco and Others , C‑604/10, EU:C:2012:115, paragraph 26).
27. It is thus apparent from the Court’s case-law, including the judgment in Fixtures Marketing (C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697), that the autonomous informative value of material which has been extracted from a collection must be assessed in the light of the value of the information not for a typical user of the collection concerned, but for each third party interested by the extracted material. In that judgment, the Court held that information relating to a football match, which had been taken by a company involved in organising betting games from a compilation that had been created by the organisers of a football league and which contained information relating to all of the fixtures in that football league, had an independent value in that it provided interested third parties — those being the betting company’s customers — with relevant information (see judgment in Fixtures Marketing , C‑444/02, EU:C:2004:697, paragraph 34).