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

[Andrew Turvey]

Sounds very worrying. Is this something that could be taken forward with a
European Citizen's Initiative? I imagine we could get the required 1m
signatures across Europe to force a debate, and seem to have the structures
to organise this.
On Feb 14, 2013 9:47 AM, "Javier Ruiz" <javier at openrightsgroup.org> wrote:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> 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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