DATABASE RIGHT
ALSO CALLED: SUI GENERIS DATABASE RIGHT
DEFINITION
The database right is a distinct EU intellectual property right protecting databases whose creation required substantial investment in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the contents, separate from any copyright in the database's structure. It gives the maker the right to prevent extraction or reuse of a substantial part of the data, regardless of whether the individual data points are themselves copyrightable.
WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE
This right has no equivalent in US law. American law protects the creative selection and arrangement of a database under ordinary copyright, following the Feist Publications ruling that facts themselves cannot be copyrighted, but the US has no separate right protecting the investment of compiling those facts.
The EU right lasts 15 years from completion of the database, but that term resets with each substantial new investment in updating it, meaning an actively maintained database can effectively be protected indefinitely, unlike a fixed copyright term.
It matters most for data-heavy products: pricing databases, directories, scientific datasets, and similar compilations, where the effort is in gathering and verifying, not in creative selection, which is exactly the kind of investment US copyright law does not protect at all.
AI training has raised new questions here, since scraping a substantial part of an EU-protected database to train a model can trigger database right infringement even where the individual scraped facts would not be copyrightable on their own.
AN EXAMPLE
A German company spends years compiling a complete database of European public transport schedules, verifying each entry against official sources. A competitor scrapes and republishes a substantial portion of that database; under EU law this can be sui generis database right infringement even though the individual schedule times are just facts and not copyrightable in themselves.
WATCH OUT
US-based teams often assume compiling a large, effortful dataset gives them the same protection Europeans get from the database right; it does not, since no such right exists under US law.
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