Sui Generis Intellectual Property Protection for Databases

Collections of works or compilations of data very often do not meet the originality requirement and thus cannot be protected by copyright, despite the large investments made to create them. At the same time, other instruments of legal protection, such as contract law and competition law, do not provide an adequate level of protection or impose high administrative burdens on the perspective rightholders. This chapter compares the approaches taken by the EU and U.S. to the legal protection of unoriginal databases, following the landmark decision in Feist. The EU introduced a sui generis regime, based on the protection of substantial investments made to produce a database, whereas the U.S. shifted from the “sweat of the brow” doctrine to an approach based on the creativity in the selection and arrangement of the materials of a database. Despite a seemingly more favourable regime for the protection of databases in the EU, the U.S. remains the world leader in the production of databases. This chapter examines the reasons behind this phenomenon and aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the EU sui generis regime for unoriginal databases.