Legal Protection Of Geographical Indications

With the development of information technology,big data,cloud computing and other information technology and the real economy appear the trend of integration,the importance of data information is more and more prominent."Internet plus" cannot do without the support of database industry,and the development of database industry cannot do without legal regulation and protection.Although the law of our country does not directly provide for the legal protection of the database,there are already precedents in judicial practice to provide protection for the database.The typical cases include the chronicle case,Wang Jiming v.copyright infringement case,sunshine data company case,Huaxinjie project database case,etc.By studying the court’s decision,we can analyze the attitude and concept of database protection.In the chronology case,we can see that the copyright law of our country recognizes the originality of the author in the form of expression of the database compilation works,mainly in the selection of content and the arrangement of structure.The publication directory compiled by Wang Jiming lacks this,so it can not be protected by copyright.In the database case of sunshine company,sunshine company defended its legitimate rights and interests with the help of the anti unfair competition law.However,in the database case of Huaxinjie project,the anti unfair competition law can not provide legal protection for Huaxinjie company because the defendant’s database utilization behavior is not competitive in the industry.Under the existing legal framework,the obligee can not find direct legal relief when the rights and interests of the database are infringed,and the court can only limit its vision to the originality of the database and the unfair competition of the infringer when hearing relevant cases.If the database does not meet the requirements of the copyright law,we can only seek the protection of the anti unfair competition law,and the anti unfair competition law can not provide comprehensive protection for the non original database because of its own defects.However,in the TV news program notice case,the court held that the recognition of the producer’s labor value by the TV station reflects a database protection concept of protecting investment,which is similar to the special rights system established by the EU database protection directive to some extent.Through the study of the EU special rights protection model and its transformation in the Member States,we can find that the implementation of the database protection directive in the EU Member States is mainly through two ways: including the right of adjacency and separate legislation.Germany is the representative country of database adjacency protection mode,while most countries have adopted a separate legislation mode for the special protection of database.Through the analysis of the two kinds of special rights model,we can find that although the neighboring right model saves the legislative cost,it will inevitably be constrained by the dichotomy of thought expression,and the most valuable part of the database is just the content rather than the structure,so the database neighboring right model is not the best construction model of the database special rights system.As a new type of legal object,in the future,when database is included in the scope of intellectual property protection in China,we should give it the database right parallel to copyright,patent right and trademark right,and adopt the mode of separate legislation to realize the comprehensive protection of database.