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As the commercial value of information and databases increases, so do the legal issues relating to their protection and exploitation. John Worthy (Report Correspondent) and Elizabeth Weightman of Allen & Overy provide an overview of the current state of play in the UK and the latest developments at an EU level. This article is based on a seminar given by the authors in September, 1995.
Today we are living in the Information Age. In the past few years there has been unprecedented demand for up to date information -the growth in the Internet is one example of this. As a result, the value of databases in any business today cannot be overstated. Banks rely on a multitude of online realtime stock market, financial and news data in order to keep up with the forever changing financial markets. Manufacturing industries have sophisticated databases for stock control, sales and marketing. In the retail sector the use of data warehousing is increasing as a decision support tool to highlight business trends. The increased role of databases has prompted closer attention to the legal framework for protecting and exploiting them. This paper therefore focuses on: โข the current intellectual property protection for databases in the UK; โข latest EU proposals on protection of databases;
โข the issue of data protection, both in the UK and at an EU level; and โข the law on liability relating to databases.
CURRENT UK PROTECTION COPYRIGHT PROTECTION OF DATABASES
It is well established that, under current English law, databases are primarily protected by copyright. Essentially, the owner of copyright in a work has a right to prevent others from copying it or undertaking certain restricted acts in relation to that work. Databases are protected by copyright as compilations. This protects the way in which the information is gathered together, rather than the content of the information itself. Thus, a database of financial market statistics would be protected by the copyright in the layout of the statistics and the way in which the columns and rows inter-relate. It would not directly protect the statistics themselves. However, if a database contains a variety of sound and video recordings, such as are used for the purposes of video on demand services, there will inevitably be a separate copyright in each of the recordings itself. In this case again the database copyright will protect the way in which those recordings are arranged, while the underlying copyright in the recordings will apply on a case by case basis. A compiler of a multimedia database is therefore faced with a potentially huge task in obtaining clearances from the owners of all the content of the database. These principles are also relevant to databases which are available on the Internet. Following the normal rules, the collections of information will be protected as compilations, in addition to any separate copyright protecting the content itself. However, it will not always be clear where the database was created and hence which law may protect it. Information held on a user's terminal or on a server in the UK may be accessed by up to 60 million users in over 160 countries round the world. Where that information is misused in cyberspace, there will be complex questions of where any infringement occurred, how far UK copyright can be enforced in that country and what other local protection may be available.
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