Can some one take public domain information, enter it into a database and then claim copyright on the resulting entry?
I recently came across this claim as a website 'disclaimer'. There is no doubt the original material is out of copyright but other than transcribing - and this could have done electronically (Google lens etc) rather than by hand, it is hard to justify any claims to copyright.
I can understand the database right but I'm struggling to understand the interaction between the two.
Thank you.
Database rights v Copyright
Re: Database rights v Copyright
Hi tackler,
It's only confusing because of the way the two rights have been brought into law (1).
Copyright in a database. This is defined in Section 3A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 as
Database right. This right is founded on a different principle, namely the amount of investment by the database maker in selecting and assembling the data. It doesn't matter if the actual data is or is not subject to copyright. The investment needed can be financial, or in terms of the amount of resources expended, including time. For example a database of European classical poems cost the Freiburg University €34,900 in labour costs to research and compile, and thus it was clearly subject to database right. In this instance the majority of the contents were poems which no longer enjoyed any copyrigh protection. It follows that because there is no stipulation that the assembling of the data needs to be done by a human, the use of bots or AI in this context does not remove the applicability of databasae right. And because database right is largely designed to protect commercial investment, it has a much shorter protection period, namely 15 years from the end of the year of completion of the database.
1. The reason we have both the new database copyright and a separate database right is because the EU was dissatisfied with the then (1996) existing levels of compatability in the protection offered by the individual EU member states, and the Database Directive (Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council) was intended to bring all the separate national legislation into harmony. A number of critics consider the Database Directive to have been poorly drafted. The UK still retains the existing EU law within our legislation, but is not bound to follow any future changes in the application of the law caused by new CJEU decisions (for instance this decision). It remains to be seen if the UK will implement its own legislative changes - the signs so far are that there is no pressing need to do so.
It's only confusing because of the way the two rights have been brought into law (1).
Copyright in a database. This is defined in Section 3A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 as
From this it can be seen that the same originality test applies as is necessary for any other copyright work, that is to say the work is product of a human mind and not copied from some other work. The only difference is that in this instance the human creativity is focussed on the selection and arrangement of the contents (ie the 'data'). In practice it is often unclear where the threshold for this exists. Most of the court cases on the issue of database copyright concern sporting fixtures and results of various kinds, including football and horseracing. Regarding the former, the European Court of Justice has said that the date, the time and names of the teams participting in a specific match can constitute separate items which the database maker can arrange 'creatively' so as to make the resulting database protectable by copyright. Somewhat similar findings have been made with regard to the names of horses, their owners, the jockeys, the colours worn, any handicaps, betting odds, as well as the time and place of a horse race. Obviously if the collection of the data had been automated (say, by using AI), then the human element would be missing and so copyright would not apply to the selection and arrangement aspects. And it follows that since names, dates, and venues etc are all facts which are not subject to copyright, a sporting fixtures database populated with data scraped by a bot or AI would not attract any copyright at all.(2) For the purposes of this Part a literary work consisting of a database is original if, and only if, by reason of the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database the database constitutes the author’s own intellectual creation
Database right. This right is founded on a different principle, namely the amount of investment by the database maker in selecting and assembling the data. It doesn't matter if the actual data is or is not subject to copyright. The investment needed can be financial, or in terms of the amount of resources expended, including time. For example a database of European classical poems cost the Freiburg University €34,900 in labour costs to research and compile, and thus it was clearly subject to database right. In this instance the majority of the contents were poems which no longer enjoyed any copyrigh protection. It follows that because there is no stipulation that the assembling of the data needs to be done by a human, the use of bots or AI in this context does not remove the applicability of databasae right. And because database right is largely designed to protect commercial investment, it has a much shorter protection period, namely 15 years from the end of the year of completion of the database.
1. The reason we have both the new database copyright and a separate database right is because the EU was dissatisfied with the then (1996) existing levels of compatability in the protection offered by the individual EU member states, and the Database Directive (Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council) was intended to bring all the separate national legislation into harmony. A number of critics consider the Database Directive to have been poorly drafted. The UK still retains the existing EU law within our legislation, but is not bound to follow any future changes in the application of the law caused by new CJEU decisions (for instance this decision). It remains to be seen if the UK will implement its own legislative changes - the signs so far are that there is no pressing need to do so.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007