Database right no good, says EU: keep anyway
Progressive copyright thinker James Boyle has published a comment in the Financial Times about the European Union’s recent study on the impact of its Database Directive. This directive creates a sort-of-copyright for databases.
Now, the EU has evaluated if this protection of databases is doing the industry any good. The criteria are really quite simple: Are there more and/or bigger databases now than there were before the directive? This is relatively easy to control, as the EU is the only place in the world granting such a right. Yep, not even the monopoly-happy US know such a thing.
And, surprise: The directive has not done any good. Quite to the contrary:
In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to pre-Directive levels and that the US database industry, which has no such intellectual property right, was growing faster than the EU’s. The gap appears to be widening.
The study proposes several roads to take now. Amazingly, after proving it’s no good, “leave things as they are” is among them, mainly because the database industry’s political influence is considered a “political reality”.
Imagine applying these arguments to a drug trial. The patients in the control group have done better than those given the drug, and there is evidence that the drug might be harmful. But the drug companies like their profits, and want to keep the drug on the market. Though “somewhat at odds” with the evidence, this is a “political reality.”