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The Rights to a Database
July 30, 2009 – 10:17 pm by John Giles
Databases have become very valuable assets. People often ask, what is the law relating to databases? What is a database? How do you define a database in an agreement? How does the law protect different aspects of a database? What type of work (for the purposes of copyright protection) is a database? Can a database qualify for copyright protection?
Do I have rights to a database even if it is simply a compilation of non-infringing material? For example, you may have a database of publicly available information. You are just the only person to have compiled all of that publicly available information in a database. Do you have any rights to the database?
a database is a collection of data from where it may be accessed, reproduced or extracted
The ECT Act defines an electronic database to be “a collection of critical data in electronic form from where it may be accessed, reproduced or extracted“. From this one could define a database as “a collection of data (usually in electronic form) from where it may be accessed, reproduced or extracted”. But we have to dig deeper than that.
Eligible for copyright protection?
Can copyright indeed exist in a database?
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