Database authorship and ownership of sui generis database rights in data-driven research

摘要

The research objective of the article is to analyse the rules on authorship and joint authorship of databases, as well as the ownership and joint ownership of database makers' sui generis rights as provided for in the Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases (DD) and its selected national implementations, and to identify the underlying problems and discuss solutions how to overcome them contractually.In order to achieve this objective, an analysis of the black-letter law and case law is provided in the second section of the paper.The DD, however, does not provide much guidance when it comes to defining the author (or joint authors) and owner (or joint owners) and leaves a lot of leeway to Member States, as is further analysed in the third section.In the fourth section of the paper, the focus turns to issues of applicable law that determine the author(s) and rights owner(s) in cases where the protectable subject matter was created/produced jointly by multiple entities from various jurisdictions.In the final fifth section of the paper, the appropriate contractual arrangements of jointly owned rights are presented as a possible solution to the legal uncertainty raised by the current black-letter law.