Data Base Directives - Essay Example

Collections of facts being made available electronically as databases are prevalent, creators of these databases are claiming on a need to provide adequate legal protection in order to protect their hoards. The European Union (EU) directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 is an intellectual property directive which deals with the legal protection of databases. It requires all the European Union (EU) member states to protect databases both by copyright and by a "sui generis" right that controls extraction and re-utilization of the contents of a database.

This directive introduces a new type of rights called the "sui generis" rights which explicitly protect collections of facts regardless of any ingenuity. It also corroborates that the database is protected by copyright if there is any sort of creativity involved in the creation of a database. For the qualification for the "sui generis" database protection rights, the producer of the database must prove that there has been a significant qualitatively and quantitatively investment in either the acquiring, authentication or management of the contents.

There is no issue of what the selection method was, or how much creativity effort was involved to make the database.The Problems The producer of a database has exclusive rights to prevent extraction or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part, of the contents of that database.- Extraction means the transfer of all or a significant part of the database to some other medium by any means or in any form. Extracting the data also means the usage of the normal interface to a database to obtain data from it.

This act includes any form of downloading the database, copying it and even printing or any other reproduction it in any other form, even either electronically or temporarily. In simple words, copying the database itself is also included in the "extraction" of the database. - Re-utilization means the distribution of all or significant amount of data of the database to the public by making copies, online, renting or any other means of transmission. This basically works by developing such a search and retrieval interface to the database, so that public or any other user can only extract information from it.

Therefore publicly lending of a database is not included as the re-utilization of that database.1Transitional ProvisionsFor the application of this directive in time, databases already in existence before the 1st January 1998, i.e. the date on which the Directive is due to be implemented, are to be protected by copyright under the Directive if they comply with the requirements explained in the above paragraphs. Article 14(2) of the Directive resolves the problem of databases already protected by copyright laws on the date on which the Directive is published but which may no longer be protected by copyright once the Directive comes into effect because the eligibility criteria for such protection by such copyright laws are less rigorous