Synonyms
Intellectual Property; License
Definition
European law provides three types of legal rights to database owners to control copying: (i) copyright law, (ii) the right to impose contracts or licenses on users, and (iii) a unique statutory right applicable to the non-copyrightable information – such as factual data – in European databases. This entry discusses only the third of these rights. This stand-alone or “sui generis” database right gives a database owner a claim against one who extracts or reuses the whole or a substantial part of the database contents, where “substantial part” is evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively.
Historical Background
Prior to 1996, the legal treatment of databases in Europe varied in the requirements for copyright protection. In 1992, the European Commission proposed that EU copyright law be harmonized with US law by requiring originality for copyright protection to apply. However, the European Commission also proposed that a separate legal...
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Carroll, M.W. (2018). European Law in Databases. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1519
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1519
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