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EBLIDA Contribution at WIPO informal meeting on Databases
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On behalf of EBLIDA, the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations that represents over 95.000 libraries in Europe, I would like to make the following contribution.
Today we are discussing the need for an international sui generis right, granted to makers of databases to protect them for a period of 15 or 25 years from extraction and utilization by others of the content of the database that he built.
Librarians are both producers and users of databases. Librarians agree that databases are vulnerable to copying, and adequate incentives are needed to ensure their continued creation and access. But do we need a new international instrument to ensure this?
Before the introduction of the EU Directive on the legal protection of databases, we were of the opinion that the then present legal, contractual and technical protection available was adequate. We urged the European Commission to proceed with great caution in this area given the risk of unintended negative consequences, such as less accessibility or more expensive data.
The implementation into national legislation of the EU Directive on the legal protection of databases has gone wrong, intentionally or unintentionally. The EU Directive will have a disastrous effect on access to information in general and on education and research in particular. In the long term this will actually be detrimental to the creation of databases.
The terminologies "substantial part", "insubstantial part" and "lawful users" in the Directive have given rise to a variety of interpretations at a national level which have resulted in granting a much higher protection than intended by the European institutions. The result is that in many cases a user cannot even enter a database without having a license to do so. It seems that individual facts are becoming the subject of private ownership and government databases are likely to be protected. This will certainly harm education, science, research and the cultural and social development of society.
You will have guessed that we are not enthusiastic about the results of the EU Directive on the legal protection of databases. Yes, we need a new international instrument. At the level of WIPO, we hope that a Treaty will be adopted that will have a positive influence on the recently introduced legislation in the countries of the European Union. We would like to suggest to the Contracting Parties to set the tone by including a preamble in a possible new Treaty with the following wording:
"Recognizing the need to maintain a balance between the rights of the maker of a database and the larger public interest, particularly, education, research and access to information"
We hope that a WIPO Database Treaty will be able to contribute to preserving the diverse and valuable cultural heritage of the world. We also hope that it will offer protection against the over-dominant control of new media by a small number of multi-national distributors.
The Hague, July 1995