ECJ Rulings in Database Cases

The European Court of Justice (the "ECJ") handed out four closely linked judgments (C-203/02, The British Horseracing Board Ltd and Others v. William Hill Organisation Ltd. the "BHB Case", C-46/02, Fixtures Marketing Ltd v. Oy Veikkaus Ab; C-338/02, Fixtures Marketing Ltd. v. Svenska Spel AB; and C-444/02, Fixtures Marketing Ltd v. Monomeles Protodikio, three latter jointly the "Fixtures Cases") on 9 November 2004 concerning the exploitation of horse racing data and fixtures list data in betting coupons.

In the judgements ECJ sets for the first time authoritative guidelines on the scope of the database right in the European Union.

The EU legislature enacted the relevant directive on the legal protection of databases (96/9/EC, the "Directive") to grant specific or sui generis protection for investments made to collect the data for databases. According to Article 7(1) of the Directive, only a database that ‘shows that there has been qualitatively