Student Projects:Database Protection:Introduction
In recent years, a good deal of concern has arisen regarding the right of entities that own databases to control how those databases are used. Many believe that databases require more protection than existing copyright law provides. Without additional protection, assert proponents of database protection, companies are discouraged from investing in the creation of databases because the fruits of their efforts could be stolen by any number of parties. Several countries have recently adopted or considered legislation designed to protect the rights of database owners.
Database owners and their competitors, however, are not the only parties concerned with this kind of legislation. Groups that are not direct competitors of the database owners, rely on access to data from many different sources. Additional protection may make their tasks more difficult or even impossible.
Assuming that more protection for databases is desirable, what methods are available? This paper discusses several possible mechanisms.
There are at least three potential avenues to consider when determining what protection methodology to employ: 1. Institution of Legislation imitating Copyright Law and the offering similar protection to databases 2. Extension of a body of case law known as the "hot news" cases 3. Retention of the status quo. We will start by providing some background on the current state of affairs (the applicability of copyright law and the hot news cases), discussing the three options listed above, and touching on the legislation currently under consideration in the United States.
Next we will examine the state of affairs in Europe. In 1996 the European Union enacted a major Directive to bolster the rights of database owners. Not only does the Directive explicitly extend copyright protection to databases, but it also creates a new type of sui generis right for database owners. The Directive has drawn a great deal of criticism from groups who fear its unintended effects on scientists, libraries, and other groups. We examine the track record of the Directive in EU courts, and the first official efforts to evaluate the Directive's effects, and provide some hope for groups concerned about the Directive's direct or indirect effects on their ability to make use of data.
In the next section, we explore the clinical researchers’ views on statutory database protection in the form of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Acts’ Privacy Rule, HIPAA. Our goal is to reconcile the researchers’ generally negative views on the subject with the costs and benefits of HIPAA implementation as he perceives them.
(Elijah's and Charistel's stuff goes here)
We will also be discussing the pros and cons of sui generis database protection. The main players will be examined as well as their arguements of for and against sui generis. The wide spread reaction to the results of the Feist case have caused a dilemma of what should be available to the public and what should be exclusive. Current database cases will show what direction the US is headed for when dealing with sui generis.
These types of database protection are in their infancy. There are a great variety of approaches to the problem, all of them largely untried and therefore, in a sense, equally valid. We make a comparison between these different approaches, evaluate their effects to date, and show that all such approaches carry inherent impediments to scientific research.
