There is fairly limited case law on what constitutes "substantial investment" under the database law. Here is an article discussing a couple of cases where significant investment was rejected, and one where it was accepted (sadly all in the context of sports, not geodata) - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ddc63c34-a49f-4876-86d5-aaec83d65ed1 Best, Kathleen
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 1:48 PM Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > sent from a phone > > > On 11. Jul 2019, at 20:23, Kathleen Lu <kathleen...@mapbox.com> wrote: > > > > "Substantial investment" may not be a black and white standard, but it > is a meaningful one. I hypothesize that Tesco would have difficulty proving > "a substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or > presentation of the contents." (Note that investment in creating/setting > the hours does not count.) > > > It may have come along as sarcasm the way I have written it, but the idea > is actually appealing: significant investment wrt the database could > eventually be dismissed for those databases, which are more or less the > result of some related operation/work, a byproduct, rather than being set > up to gather and analyze data without being required in the operation. The > investment would be the operation, while the db as a byproduct would be > almost “free”. The OpenStreetMap database would still be protected under > perspective, but a lot of databases would not be protected automatically > any more. > > The maps the GIS department releases are definitely requiring a > significant investment, but the lists of streets a municipality releases > would probably not be covered by the sui generis rule because there is not > much specific investment behind such a compilation, it is a byproduct of > their operation as a public administration. Or the post code lists of the > postal service: the effort is not specifically put into the db, they only > have to print what they already know from planning and organizing the > postal service. > > Is there already case law with examples where a claimed significant > investment has been rejected? I would suspect that almost any database > could be seen as having required a lot of investment for the creation and > updates, or not, according to how you put it. > > From a practical point of view I agree I would not be worried about > copying opening hours (or addresses, or phone numbers) from a retail > company’s website, e.g. Tesco. It’s more likely they would pay you for this > than sue you. > > Cheers Martin
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