The case was brought by Wegener and PCM, who are the publishers
of several major newspapers in the Netherlands. The two companies
claimed that Hunter Select, a job search web site provider, had
infringed their database rights by copying excerpts of job
advertisements published on their newspapers’ web sites and
circulating them on its own site.
In its decision on 18th July 2002, the court dismissed the
publishers’ claims, ruling that by copying and posting the adverts,
Hunter Select was not infringing their database rights.
The court reasoned that under the Dutch Database Act 1999, which
implemented the EU Database Directive, a newspaper does not
constitute a database and therefore its provisions did not apply to
the case.
Wegener and PCM have stated that they will appeal the
decision.
The Dutch ruling contrasts with recent rulings in Germany and
Denmark. In Copenhagen last month, the Bailiff’s Court applied the
Database Directive to order a news web site to remove hyperlinks,
which had been created without the permission of the publishers, to
certain newspapers’ on-line articles.
In a similar case in Germany, a Munich court ruled that a news
search engine which linked directly to newspapers’ on-line stories,
bypassing the web sites’ homepages, violated EU database law.
The Database Directive, which applies to both electronic and
non-electronic databases, grants copyright protection to database
creators in the selection and arrangement of the information
contained in databases.
This right is regardless of whether the database creator owns
the copyright in the information contained within the database. The
Directive gives creators the right to control or prohibit temporary
reproduction of all or substantial amounts of the database content
but the extraction of “insubstantial amounts of data” is
permitted.
It appears, however, that the definition of “database” has
created complexities for courts in Europe.
