Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There | Techdirt

"One of the more benighted moves by the European Union was the introduction of a special kind of copyright for databases in 1996: not for their contents, but for their compilation. This means that even if the contents are in the public domain, the database may not be. Thanks to a recent court judgment in France, this 'database right' now threatens to become a real danger for the burgeoning open data movement in Europe (original in French). The case concerns the site NotreFamille.com ('Our Family'), which wanted to obtain a copy of various public records held in digital form by the department of Vienne in France. These were things like parish records and census information for the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s -- all clearly in the public domain. But the region refused to make the digital versions of the records available, even though NotreFamille.com offered to pay, on the grounds that it had a separate database right in the digitized collection that enabled it to withhold what would otherwise be released as open data: 'in order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of Vienne told the court it had 'committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000] to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken eight years.' This concerns a normal investment made in the context of the public service mission of the department, but it is sufficient, according to the court, to establish that the department is indeed a 'database producer' with an exclusive right on the latter that allows it not to meet the requirement of open data.'  That's really bad news, since it effectively guts the requirement to make public information freely available as open data, if held in a database that required some effort to put together, as is usually the case. Moreover, other courts in the European Union may well take a similar view, since the database right is Europe-wide..."