PUBLISHERS CANNOT REPLICATE PUBLIC DATABASES FOR COMMERCIAL GAIN WITHOUT PERMISSION: ECJ
October 1st, 2008
BY KEITH NUTHALL
PUBLISHERS using compendiums of out-of-copyright materials to produce their own collections of works can be blocked from selling these books, if they "transfer a substantial part" of the original source to their own publication. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that if undertaken in the European Union (EU), this breaks the EU database directive, even if the material was not electronically copied from the source. The precedent setting judgement came in a case involving the University of Freiburg, which had spent Euro 34,900 ...
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