[Opengenalliance] Fwd: Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There | Techdirt

[Javier Ruiz]

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From: "Lee Maguire" <lee at openrightsgroup.org>
Date: Feb 13, 2013 5:48 PM
Subject: Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There |
Techdirt
To: "Open Rights Group" <news at openrightsgroup.org>


http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130211/08050521945/europes-database-right-could-throttle-open-data-moves-there.shtml

Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There

from the worse-than-useless dept

One of the more benighted moves by the European Union was the introduction
of a special kind of copyright for databases in 1996: not for their
contents, but for their compilation. This means that even if the contents
are in the public domain, the database may not be. Thanks to a recent court
judgment in France, this "database right" now threatens to become a real
danger for the burgeoning open data movement in Europe (original in French).

The case concerns the site NotreFamille.com ("Our Family"), which wanted to
obtain a copy of various public records held in digital form by the
department of Vienne in France. These were things like parish records and
census information for the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s -- all clearly in the
public domain. But the region refused to make the digital versions of the
records available, even though NotreFamille.com offered to pay, on the
grounds that it had a separate database right in the digitized collection
that enabled it to withhold what would otherwise be released as open data:

in order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of
Vienne told the court it had "committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000]
to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken
eight years." This concerns a normal investment made in the context of the
public service mission of the department, but it is sufficient, according
to the court, to establish that the department is indeed a "database
producer" with an exclusive right on the latter that allows it not to meet
the requirement of open data.
That's really bad news, since it effectively guts the requirement to make
public information freely available as open data, if held in a database
that required some effort to put together, as is usually the case.
Moreover, other courts in the European Union may well take a similar view,
since the database right is Europe-wide.
This is galling because, unlike most copyright legislation, the database
right law was followed up with some research commissioned by the EU in
order to examine whether the premise -- that providing an additional
intellectual monopoly on the database separate from its contents would
stimulate extra investment by European publishers -- was in fact true. The
evidence was pretty clear (pdf):

Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new
instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases. Data
taken from the GDD (see Section 4.2.3) show that the EU database production
in 2004 has fallen back to pre-Directive levels: the number of EU-based
database "entries" into the GDD6 was 3095 in 2004 as compared to 3092 in
1998. In 2001, there were 4085 EU-based"entries" while in 2004 there were
only 3095.
So this new monopoly turned out to be a complete flop. Worse, as the
current case in Vienne shows, it is now starting to have negative effects
on other initiatives. Clearly, the time has come to repeal this legislation
before it starts to throttle a potentially important new area for growth in
Europe.
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