Intellectual property
The case of the British Horseracing Board (BHB) and William Hill put a serious dent in the protection that owners of databases could use to protect their investment. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in that case ruled that the BHB had not put enough effort into the creation of its database to qualify for protection under the European Union Database Directive 1996. They therefore had no defence to argue to prevent William Hill accessing its database of horses and riders running on a particular day. A recent ECJ judgment has provided database owners with strengthened rights to protect their work against unauthorised access, although it did not look at the central question in the BHB case - what constitutes a 'database'. Full Article Database rights improved following ECJ judgment The case of the British Horseracing Board (BHB) and William Hill put a serious dent in the protection that owners of databases could use to protect their investment. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in that case ruled that the BHB had not put enough effort into the creation of its database to qualify for protection under the European Union Database Directive 1996. They therefore had no defence to argue to prevent William Hill accessing its database of horses and riders running on a particular day. A recent ECJ judgment has provided database owners with strengthened rights to protect their work against unauthorised access, although it did not look at the central question in the BHB case - what constitutes a 'database'. The case concerned a database of poem titles created by the University of Freiburg and one of its Professors, Dr Ulrich Knoop. Professor Knoop had been instrumental in the compilation of the 1,100 most important poems in German between 1720 and 1900, which took two and a half years to complete and cost the University €34,900. The titles had been published on the internet and were the basis for the anthology created by Professor Knoop. It came to the University's attention that a company, Directmedia Publishing had published a CD-ROM called '1000 poems everyone should have' which had 876 poems from the period 1720 - 1900, all but 20 were on the University anthology. Knoop and the University sued Directmedia, claiming infringement of copyright and database infringement. Germany's District Court of Justice ruled in favour of Knoop's copyright claim as compiler of the anthology, and also ruled in favour of the University in its claim for database infringement. Directmedia appealed to the Provincial Court of Appeal which failed. They then appealed on a point of law to the German Federal Court of Justice who upheld Professor Knoop's copyright claim and accepted that the list of titles in the anthology was a 'database' within the meaning of the Directive. The Federal Court then referred the case to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling. The issue for the ECJ was whether Directmedia's use of the contents of the database was an 'extraction' under the Directive. Before the ECJ gave judgment, ECJ Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston gave her opinion on the case. She noted that extraction from a database "does not necessarily presuppose the [physical] copying of data". Her opinion was that: "In order to constitute an 'extraction' ... it is immaterial whether the transfer of data from a database ... and their incorporation in a different database takes place following individual assessments of the data after consulting the database." She said her opinion followed the BHB ruling: "It seems to me that transcribing the content of a database after consulting it on-screen and then incorporating it into a different database is just as likely to prejudice the investment of the maker of the database as copying that database electronically or photo-copying it," "The Court's analysis in The British Horseracing Board does not presuppose that 'extraction' should be limited to these latter ways of copying (parts of) a database." The ECJ agreed. "It cannot ... be argued, as Directmedia has done, that only acts consisting of the mechanical reproduction, without adaptation, by means of a standard 'copy/paste' process, of the contents of a database or a part of such a database fall within the concept of extraction," The judgment concluded: "The transfer of material from a protected database to another database following an on screen consultation of the first database and an individual assessment of the material contained in that first database is capable of constituting an 'extraction' [within the meaning of the Directive] to the extent that - which it is for the referring court to ascertain - that operation amounts to the transfer of a substantial part, evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively, of the contents of the protected database, or to transfers of insubstantial parts which, by their repeated or systematic nature, would have resulted in the reconstruction of a substantia