A special case: The European database directive

Big Data: Legal Challenges (Full Report)

The database right is a peculiarly European right, brought into effect by the Database Directive³⁵. The Database Directive grew out of the EU Information Market Policies Actions Program established to promote the information services market. Intellectual property protection for databases became a primary issue. The result was the Database Directive which notes in its Preamble the following matters:

• the making of databases requires the investment of considerable human, technical and financial resources while such databases can be copied or accessed at a fraction of the cost needed to design them independently;
• the unauthorised extraction and/or re-utilisation of the contents of a database can have serious economic and technical consequences;