Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mäkinen Kaisa <Kaisa.Makinen AT hel.fi>]

Dear Aurelia,

 

The Finnish Copyright Act, Section 49 prescribes that (unofficial English translation, available at www.finlex.fi):

 

(1) A person who has made

1. a catalogue, a table, a program or any other product in which a large number of

information items are compiled, or

2. a database the obtaining, verification or presentation of which has required

substantial investment,

shall have the exclusive right to control the whole or, in qualitative or quantitative terms, a

substantial part thereof, by making copies of it and by making it available to the public.

 

Section (1)1. prescribes the catalogue right and (1)2. the database sui generis right (as written in the EU directive). As you can see, these two rights are combined under the same section. The rights they confer to the rightholder are the same. Both provide protection for a work that is not a copyrighted work but is a collection of a large amount of information, in digital or other form. Essential in these both rights is that the protection is given due to the investments (financial or other) made by the maker of the catalogue or database. This was also the main reason for adopting the EU database directive. My understanding is, that in most cases, a work described in the Section 49 can have both a catalogue right protection and a sui generis database right protection at the same time. In practice, this is not a problem because the rights given to the rightholder are the same in both cases. There can, however, exist cases where a collection of information cannot get sui generis database protection but may have catalogue right protection. For example databases whose content is collected from automated measurement or imaging instruments do not have sui generis database rights but may, instead, have a catalogue right protection.

 

Perhaps someone with more scientific approach to law can give a more detailed explanation. I would also be interested to hear opinions of colleagues from other Nordic Coutries.

 

Best, Kaisa