A Comparative Study Of Electronic Database And Copyright Protection

The overall characteristics and applications of databases, in particular those which are electronic, are described in the context of the protection of intellectual property rights. Although databases may contain vast quantities of highly important and useful data, and may in some cases be the result of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work (data collection, database management systems...), copyright protection of this work is not always guaranteed. This study presents the main characteristics of several copyright protection directives, based in several different countries or regions, showing that under some circumstances a database can be granted copyright protection, whereas under different circumstances, or in different countries, the same database may not receive a similar legal protection.