Brussels, 01/03/2012 (Agence Europe) - A database, the compilation of which is dictated by rules or constraints which leave no room for creative freedom on the part of its compiler in terms of selection and arrangement of the data, cannot be protected by copyright even though they require considerable knowledge and work on the part of their author.
That is the substance of the ruling handed down by the Court of Justice of the EU in Case C-604/10 on Thursday 1 March, responding to questions put by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. This court, which was hearing a dispute over the intellectual property of football fixture lists, asked the Court of Justice if Directive 96/9/EC, which harmonises protection of databases and grants them copyright protection “if the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute the author's own intellectual creation”, applies to these fixture lists.
The Court states, first, that the copyright protection provided for by the database directive concerns the “structure” of the database, and not its “contents” (i.e. the data themselves). Thus, the concepts of “selection” and of “arrangement” within the meaning of the directive refer respectively to the selection and the arrangement of data, through which the author gives the database its structure and can express his/her creativity. By contrast, those concepts do not extend to the creation of the data contained in that database. Consequently, the intellectual effort and skill of creating data are not relevant in order to assess the eligibility of the database that contains them for the copyright protection provided for by the directive.
The Court then observes that the notion of “intellectual creation”, which is a necessary condition in order to be eligible for copyright protection, refers to the sole criterion of originality. As regards the setting up of a database, that criterion of originality is satisfied “when, through the selection or arrangement of the data which it contains, its author expresses his creative ability in an original manner by making free and creative choices”, the Court says. The “addition of important significance” to the data by their selection or arrangement in the database does not affect the determination of the originality required for that database to be protected by copyright.
Similarly, the fact that the setting up of the database required, irrespective of the creation of the data which it contains, significant labour and skill on the part of its author does not justify, as such, the protection of it by copyright if that labour and that skill do not express any originality in the selection or arrangement of that data.
The Court states that, given that the directive harmonises the protection given by copyright to databases, national legislation which grants copyright protection under conditions which are different from those set out in the directive is incompatible with European Union law. (FG/transl.rt)