Research on the Legal Protection of Databases in the Digital World

This research is about whether the legal protection of databases in the digital world is sufficient and what favorable regulations should be developed.

Due to the rapid development of database industry as a result of the information explosion, developed countries have realized the importance of database protection and have tried to provide several legal regimes for databases which do not match the originality requirements in the copyright law. The necessity of database protection arose from the Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases and was introduced by the scholars.

The databases with abundant information may be lack for proper protection because their selection and arrangement do not satisfy the originality requirement of compilation in the copyright law. However, is the legal regime of Sui Generis in the Directive 96/9/EC the most favorable mode? Will the legal regime cause any harmful effect in other aspects? Is there any other feasible legal protection?

Chapter 1 collects the domestic literature to introduce the issue of the research. Chapter 2 discusses whether the digital databases should be protected in a different way from the traditional databases and confirms whether the research should be conducted in two separated aspects correspondingly. Chapter 3 introduces all the possible legal protections of databases and discusses whether these regimes provide a complete protection, if not, what the problems could be. Chapter 4 adopts a comparative study method and introduces the relevant international norms and the representative legal regimes. Chapter 5 is the most important chapter in this research. After introducing all the legal protections, Chapter 5 analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of these regimes and then provides information and suggestion for the legislation amendment. Chapter 6 tries to find another civil regime for the database protection and confirms again whether there is a necessity of amendment or not. Chapter 7 synthesizes the advices of scholars and discusses whether they are feasible or what the problems could be. Chapter 8 is the conclusion of this research, including the finding, the suggestion, the limits of this research and the perspectives.