Legal Protection of Online Databases
By Catherine Sansum Kirkman
The World Wide Web is one big, electronic database. No one owns the whole thing, but each Web publisher owns a part of this global database. Services on the Web that search and index different topics own the database of Web-site listings that they have compiled for a particular topic, but not the Web sites themselves. Why discuss the Web in terms of a database? Exploitation of databases online is considered one of the most lucrative propositions of the information age; at the same time, database owners risk wholesale piracy of their database contents.
This column discusses the intellectual-property rights that subsist in online databases, along with the unique issues that relate to their legal protection. This topic is especially timely in 1998, now that special protections for databases have gone into effect in the European Union.
Copyright Protection of Databases
Aren't databases protected by copyright, like other works of authorship? The answer is both yes, and no. It's possible to copyright the manner in which data is compiled, as well as data selection, ordering, and arrangement, but not the data contained within a database. No one owns the factual information in a database, as the facts do not originate from the author, who merely collects and collates them.
As a result, a database owner could sue for infringement if someone copied a database and reproduced it using the same selection and arrangement, but not if someone merely extracted the data and repurposed it in a new way that did not use the original method of arrangement.
