Study On The Legal Protection Of Databases

As an essential tool for the Information Society, database is bound to urge countries all over the world to develop the database industry. However, the sharp contrast between the huge investment in the production of database and the easy infringement of it greatly hurt the database producers, hampering the development of the database industry. As a result, countries around the world struggled to seek legal protection for databases, having created a wide range of models of protection in which there are inherent flaws. Copyright protection models, set up by the principle that only the originality is protected, are difficult to provide full and effective protection for databases. The sui generis right model subjects to all the questions and oppositions due to the fact that it's difficult to accurately define the conditions of the protection and the overprotection of the producers' interests. Anti-Unfair Competition Law protection model, owing to the limitation of the range of protection and the ambiguity of protection standard, only serves as a supplementary means of legal protection. Other legal protection models, such as protection of contract law and business secret law, have defects, too, such as limitation and ambiguity in the scope of protection and others. Therefore, how to establish a reasonable legal model to protect databases has been a focus and academic difficulty of legal research in recent years both at home and abroad. Based on a full analysis of various database protection models, and combined the current legal situation and situation of the database industry in our country, this thesis is to propose some legislative suggestions for the protection of our databases while critically taking advantage of the instructive elements of a variety of protection models.The basic structure of this article reads as follows: Foreword, a brief introduction to the status quo of research on the legal protection of databases, hot issues and difficulties; The first chapter, an overview of the legal protection of databases including the concepts and features, the classification, the need for legal protection of databases, theoretical principles of legal protection of the databases; Chapter II, analysis of the database protection model, review on the database copyright protection model, on the protection of the sui generis model, on the anti-unfair competition law protection model, and on other legal protection model; Chapter III, analysis of the status quo of the development of database industry and current situation of legal protection in our country and reflection on some typical cases of its kind; Chapter IV, legislative proposals to China's legal protection of databases such as legislative principles, basic requirements, legislative models and the aspects which may be employed in legislation; Conclusion, a summary of the thesis and an outlook on it.