another fun fact: only the UK, EU and Russia have "database rights". No other country has anything similar. And I'm guessing a good reason why no one else has this has to do with free use and research.
Basically, in the EU, UK and Russia I can't even reconstruct your database piece by piece.
> Basically, in the EU, UK and Russia I can't even reconstruct your database piece by piece.
You are entitled to create a similar database based on your own efforts or research. So, you could walk the streets of London with an iPad to make your own KmlxStreetMap. You just can't directly copy or transfer rows from someone else's.
Yes, database rights in the EU/UK sense are an oddity in IP law. They look a lot more powerful at first glance than they have proved to be when tested in court, and they only last 15 years.
They might be useful for something like stopping someone who is in a jurisdiction where they apply from scraping your site to download a database you spent significant money collecting. But that doesn't help you if whoever is scraping your site is based somewhere else, which includes most of the world.
I wonder whether database rights would actually hold up for something like OpenStreetMap anyway. Is OSM generating new data in a creative process or investing significant effort in collecting data that existing sources? If it's the former then copyright probably does apply but database rights probably don't according to CJEU case law. If it's the latter then it's probably the other way around.
Whichever is the case, relocating your whole legal entity to the EU because of an issue like this might be a rather extreme reaction, and from the report it appears the decision here was made on the basis of many small factors and not just the issue of database rights.
It can easily turn into a farce. In the Netherlands there was a case where a company was allowed to copy the phone book, but only as long as they had real people manually copy the data from the original book.
Now I'm wondering if you can license a database file under Creative Commons or GPL and grant others the ability to freely copy it as long as they follow the licensing terms?
I am note sure how one can even have database rights.
If I compile a record of all temperatures for the last 10 years, How can I prevent someone from also creating a database that has temperatures for the last 10 years?
That is why in US Law facts can not be copyrighted, only "creative" works, and facts are not creative they are facts
