Database protection is a special right belonging to whoever made a substantial investment in the compilation, verification, or presentation of a database – even when the individual data items are not themselves subject to copyright. The maker has the right to prevent the extraction and re-utilisation of a substantial part of the content, and repeated extraction of smaller parts that together form a substantial part is also considered an infringement. For companies this has a direct impact on automated collection: downloading an entire catalogue, price list, or register from a third-party website can infringe this right regardless of whether the data is publicly available. A safe approach is to work with open data, an official interface, or the express consent of the operator.
See also: Legal aspects of scraping, Open data and public registers, Competitor price monitoring.
