Research On The Intellectual Property Protection Of Database

This article will simply discuss the intellectual property protection about database. As its great importance known to us, people who get more related information will get more wealth. More and more people prefer getting information through database. Not only because it has so much information in it, but also the way to get them is so convenient. How to protect it correctly and to do a favor to its development has aroused international community's attention. The 96/9/EC has already been carried out in European member states. The Unites States has proposed legislative bills on database many times. WIPO also proposed Draft Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Database.This article analyzes the database's characteristics and our practice of database protection through empirical analysis method and comparative method. Several recommendations are made after discussing the existing intellectual protection method of databases and learning from other countries'legislation model on database protection.The whole article is divided into five parts besides the introduction and conclusion. About 30,000 words.The first part summarizes the database. This section introduces its concept, characteristics, classification, demonstrating the need to protect our intellectual property of database through two sides. They are our database's character and development of it.The second part analyzes the current protecting method of database. Before 1996's EU Database Protection Directive, countries protect database mainly by copyright, anti-unfair competition law. Contract law, technical measures and business secrets are supplementary protection. The 1996 EU Database Protection Directive of, protects the database through two-tier protection scheme creatively, which including copyrights and special right. The copyrights protects those original databases, at the same time, provides special rights to those databases don't have original creation, protecting database makers'interest. In this part, it focuses on a comparative analysis of the advantages and shortcomings on the copyright protection and special rights protection.The third part tells the substance of protecting database, which balancing the interest between knowledge getters and knowledge creators. Knowledge of database is a new product. The reasonable protection of it will provide a better developmental environment and made common development of mankind.The forth part is mainly about our database protection of intellectual property. Our database protection bases primarily on"Copyright Law", which protect original database as compilation. The Anti-Unfair Competition Law and the Civil Law also provide a legal basis for the protection. During judicial practice, typical cases of database protection were provided law basis by them.The fifth part is our choices in intellectual property protection and some legislative proposals. It is not the best way to protect database by special rights. Improving the existing copyright, protecting original databases by copyright and non-original databases by neighboring right, is our better choice, that is adding a new section about"database protection"in our current copyright law in chapter IV-Neighboring Rights. Then we can protect non-original database by it. The rest original databases will directly protect by copyright law.