Assistant Prof. Maria Bottis: How open data became proprietary in the European Court of Justice

Assistant Prof. Maria Bottis delivers a lecture for the NEXA Center for Internet and Society , 24.9.2015, 16.00-18.00, entitled: "How open data became proprietary in the European Court of Justice".

The presentation deals with the legal protection of databases in Europe. An unfair competition model, as proposed before the enactment of the databases Directive 96/9 turned into a clear copyright model, with the difference that this time, a new sui generis right was instituted to protect not original works of the mind but data collections. The cases that came before the ECJ on the interpretation of the Directive gave the chance to “domesticate”, as Professor Hugenholtz has aptly described, this unruly database right. The Court for a long time limited the application of the Directive to cases where unfair use was truly present. But in 2015, with Ryanair, the Court took an abrupt step to the entirely wrong direction: towards rendering proprietary, at any terms, data that never before one would deem possible to be enclosed as such. The choice is now ours: either we fight, as quickly as we can, to negate the results of this manifestly wrong decision, or we decide that in the EU, there can be no open data, public data, anymore.

See more at: nexa.polito.it