LUXEMBOURG: Professor stops publishers replicating public databases for commercial gain without permission
October 1st, 2008
By Keith Nuthall
A German professor has won a precedent-setting case which will prevent European Union (EU) publishers from using university-collated compendiums of out-of-copyright materials to produce their own commercial collections of works. A ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), in Luxembourg, has said publishers can be blocked from selling these books, if they "transfer a substantial part" of the original source to their own publication. Judges said that if undertaken in the European Union (EU), this breaks the EU database directive, ...
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