The Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases is a directive of the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...

in the field of

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

law, made under the internal market provisions of the

Treaty of Rome The Treaty of Rome, or EEC Treaty (officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community), brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best known of the European Communities (EC). The treaty was sig ...

. It harmonises the treatment of

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

s under copyright law and the ''

sui generis ''Sui generis'' ( , ) is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind", "in a class by itself", therefore "unique". A number of disciplines use the term to refer to unique entities. These include: * Biology, for species that do not fit in ...

'' right for the creators of databases which do not qualify for copyright. the directive is being reviewed as part of a proposed

Data Act The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) is a law that aims to make information on federal expenditures more easily accessible and transparent. The law requires the U.S. Department of the Treasury to establish common st ...

. Public submissions closed on 25June 2021, Lead DG: CNECT/G1. Landing page for download given. Download name: 090166e5ddb6bc31.pdf. and a proposal for new harmonised rules on data was published on 23 February 2022.

Definition of database

Article 1(2) defines a database 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". Non-electronic databases are also covered (para. 14 of the preamble). Any computer program used to create the database is not included (para. 23 of the preamble). Copyright protection of software is governed by Directive 91/250/EEC.

Copyright

Under Article 3, databases which, "by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents, constitute the author's own intellectual creation" are protected by copyright as collections: no other criterion may be used by Member States. This follows from the 1994 Agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a widely adopted treaty to which all

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and e ...

members are party. TRIPS clarifies and arguably relaxes the criterion for protection of collections in the

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of l ...

, which covers "collections of literary and artistic works" and requires creativity in the "selection ''and'' arrangement" of the contents: in practice the difference is likely to be slight. Any copyright in the database is separate from and without prejudice to the copyright in the entries. The acts restricted by copyright are similar to those for other types of work (Art. 5): * temporary or permanent reproduction by any means and in any form, in whole or in part; * translation, adaptation, arrangement and any other alteration; * any form of distribution to the public of the database or of copies thereof, subject to the

exhaustion of rights The exhaustion of intellectual property rights constitutes one of the limits of intellectual property (IP) rights. Once a given product has been sold under the authorization of the IP owner, the reselling, rental, lending and other third party comme ...

; * any communication, display or performance to the public; * any reproduction, distribution, communication, display or performance to the public of a translation, adaptation, etc. This shall not prevent the lawful use of the database by a lawful user rt. 6(1) Member States may provide for any or all of the following limitations rt. 6(2) as well as applying any traditional limitations to copyright: * reproduction for private purposes of a non-electronic database; * use for the sole purpose of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source is indicated and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved; * use for the purposes of public security or for the purposes of an administrative or judicial procedure. Copyright protection usually lasts for seventy years after the death of the last publicly identified author. Anonymous or pseudonymous works gain protection for the later of 70 years after the work is lawfully made available to the public or 70 years from creation. If national legislation makes particular provision for collective works or for a legal person (i.e. a body corporate) to be a rights holder the term of protection of calculated in the same way as for anonymous or pseudonymous works, with the exception that if any natural persons who created the work are given credit in versions made available to the public, the term of protection is calculated according to the lives of those authors. Art. 1,

Directive 93/98/EEC Directive may refer to: * Directive (European Union), a legislative act of the European Union * Directive (programming), a computer language construct that specifies how a compiler should process input * "Directive" (poem), a poem by Robert Frost ...

Implementation

Notable litigation

British Horseracing Board

The

British Horseracing Board __FORCETOC__ From 10 June 1993 until 30 July 2007, the British Horseracing Board (BHB) was the governing authority for horseracing in Great Britain. It was created in 1993, and took on responsibilities previously held by the Jockey Club. This wa ...

(BHB) was the claimant in a notable case. At dispute was the re‑use of the contents of their horseracing information subscription service by other parties. The

European Court of Justice The European Court of Justice (ECJ, french: Cour de Justice européenne), formally just the Court of Justice, is the supreme court of the European Union in matters of European Union law. As a part of the Court of Justice of the European Un ...

(ECJ) ruled in 2004 that the resources used for the creation of materials which make up the contents of a database are not protected and BHB duly lost their litigation.

Apis-Hristovich EOOD v Lakorda AD

A preliminary court ruling (Case C-545/07) issued in 2009 in response to a Bulgarian court referral from the Sofiyski gradski sad (

Sofia Sofia ( ; bg, София, Sofiya, ) is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and ha ...

City Court). Apis and Lakorda both operated legal information databases. Lakorda had been set up by former Apis employees and Apis alleged that Lakorda had extracted data from two law information modules within its database. The ruling looked at the meaning of the terms "

extraction Extraction may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Comedo extraction, a method of acne treatment * Dental extraction, the surgical removal of a tooth from the mouth Computing and information science * Data extraction, the pro ...

", "permanent transfer" and "temporary transfer" in relation to data, and also established that any module within a database which could be defined as a database under the Directive should be treated as a database in itself.IP-PorTal
European Court of Justice, 5 March 2009, Apis v Lakorda
accessed 3 July 2022

CV-Online Latvia

An ECJ ruling (ECLI:EU:C:2021:434) in June 2021 markedly raised the threshold for infringement to occur: a claimant now needs to establish that an alleged "substantial extraction" also caused "significant detriment" to its investment in that database. The case itself (C762/19) concerned two Latvian companies providing job seeking services: CVOnline Latvia and Melons. 6pages. Husovec and Derclaye opine that the ECJ now "requires that all acts of extraction and re-utilization must lead to a risk that the database maker is not able to recoup its initial investment because of these actions nd thatwhile considering the risk, the national courts must balance the interests of other parties as part of the infringement test".

Notes

Council Directive 91/250/EEC of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs
OJ L 122, 17 May 1991, p. 9.

# ttp://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31993L0098:EN:HTML Council Directive 93/98/EEC of 29 October 1993 harmonizing the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights OJ L 290, 24 November 1993, p. 9.

References

External links

Text of the directive First evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases
2005-12-12. *Gasaway, L.:

', Cyberspace law course, Spring 2006,

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

. URL. Retrieved 2007-04-14. {{Intellectual property laws of the European Union Copyright law of the European Union European Union directives 1996 in law 1996 in the European Union Database law Data laws of Europe