Compilations - copyright, European perspective

[Rami Heinisuo]

The situation in Europe is that the European Union is preparing a database
directive, which would protect large data collections, ie. databases. This
would mean similar protection for databases like books etc. have nowadays.
I'm not sure if this could be called copyright since compilations do not
have any artistic or creative input. And by compilations I mean only
datasets and NOT the stucture of records etc. 

Personally I'm a bit suspicious considering this directive, but time will
tell the final form and action. In principle it is a good idea to protect
someone's financial investment (and collecting data can be very costly
sometimes), but it should not make information harder to obtain and disseminate.

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Rami Heinisuo
Information specialist
Finland
lirahe at uta.fi


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