The article appears in the Policy Forum section of Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Europe's Database Experiment" focuses on a 1996 EC decision to extend protection to ordinary facts such as telephone numbers, web addresses and weather data.European leaders have threatened to restrict the flow of information from Europe unless similar measures are passed in the U.S. Last March, U.S. congressional leaders pledged to pass a database protection bill in 2001.
"An environment in the scientific community of open access and free exploration is critical for advancing knowledge," says Onsrud, who chairs the U.S. national committee of CODATA, a group interested in the sharing of scientific and technical information worldwide among scientists. "We openly publish our research results. We seek peer review, invite others to critique our work, extract data from our work, retest hypotheses and challenge each other so that knowledge progresses. If you now need permission to take data from an electronic journal article before you can use it in a critique or extend from it, that has substantial potential for impeding the advancement of science."
Information that amounts to ordinary facts cannot be copyrighted in the U.S., although creative selection and arrangement of such facts can be protected. This means typically that wholesale copying of databases without permission breaches U.S. law. If the U.S. were to follow the EC’s lead, however, businesses and researchers would need to negotiate payments or permissions for copying facts from databases, including facts in databases collected with public funds but practically accessible only through private companies.
"Information innovations have been able to thrive in this country," Onsrud adds. "One of the reasons for this is the level of access we provide through our laws not only to government works, which is very substantial, but also to private works. We have much greater leeway in the United States to build upon the works of others than is seen in other nations."
"This is a likely reason why the information industry has thrived in the U.S., because businesses have to continually look over their shoulders. The next guy is building on your work and catching up. As a result, we have a very fast moving and vital economy. The current balance in the law keeps us all moving forward. The legal pendulum in the U.S. is swung more toward protecting new innovations as opposed to protecting old investments in innovations. The pendulum in Europe now is far more in the other direction."
"A major concern for us is that the effects of the database legislation in Europe may ultimately harm trade with the U.S. and the world economy may suffer if more countries enact the European approach to database protection," says Onsrud. Countries outside the EC are looking to the U.S. to provide an alternative to the broad-based EC information protection approach.
The core message of the Science article is that the U.S. Congress should look very closely at the ramifications of the EC database directive on the economy and on science in Europe before it considers passing similar legislation in the U.S. The authors point to initial evidence that does not look good.
They indicate that repeal of the EC policy is unlikely. They offer recommendations to modify it by exempting some uses, such as scientific and educational activities, limiting protection to information databases that might not exist without it, and limiting protection by using "unfair competition law" as an alternative approach.
Journal
Science