The Directive on the legal protection of Databases was adopted in February 1996. The Directive created a new exclusive 'sui generis' right for database producers, valid for 15 years, to protect their investment of time, money and effort, irrespective of whether the database is in itself innovative ("non-original" databases).

The European Commission published on 12 December 2005 an evaluation of the protection EU law gives to databases. The evaluation focuses on whether the introduction of this right led to an increase in the European database industry. It also looks at whether the scope of the right targets those areas where Europe needs to encourage innovation.

The directive was strongly criticised for being a useless invention of the European Community, especially created to stimulate the database sector to compete with the US.However there is no proof it has brought the expected improvement. This is in fact admitted in the evaluation by the Commission:: "The economic impact of the "sui generis" right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases."

It is also considered that the US database industry, where there is no specific database right, has been growing much faster than the one in EU, the report mentioning that "the ratio of European/US database production, which was nearly 1:2 in 1996, has become 1:3 in 2004."

The report takes also into consideration the impact the European Court of Justice has made with the Decision in the case The British Horseracing Board vs. William Hill on 9 November 2004. The decision is diminishing the legal protection of so called 'spin-off' databases under the Database Directive 1996/9/EC. In order to claim 'sui generis' database protection, a substantial investment must be made "in seeking, collecting, verifying and presenting existing materials". ( see EDRI-Gram 2.22 )

The report suggests a series of possible actions related to the directive: repeal the whole directive, withdraw the sui-generis right, amend the sui-generis provision or maintain the status-quo.

Despite the reserved evaluations of the report, the European Commission considers that "further evidence on the usefulness of "sui generis" protection needs to be gathered " and therefore stakeholders are invited to comment on the evaluation by 12 March 2006.

James Boyle: Two database cheers for the EU ( 2 01 2006)
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/99610a50-7bb2-11da-ab8e-0000779e2340.html

Press Release : Intellectual property: evaluation of EU rules on databases (12 12 2005)
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/1567...

Evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/copyright/docs/databases/eva...

EDRI-gram - ECJ: no legal protection for spin-off databases (17.11.2004)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number2.22/databases