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Consultation results | Publication

Synopsis report of the public consultation on the evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases

The Evaluation Report on the Database Directive has been published on the 25th of April as part of the third data package. Within this evaluation context, the Commission carried out a public consultation between 24 May, and 30 August 2017. The aim of the consultation was to understand how the Database Directive, and in particular the sui generis protection of databases, is applied and what impact it had on users and makers. 113 replies were received (mainly from the publishing sector, the research and academic sector, the IT sector and the transport sector).

It shows that the views are divided among stakeholders. Some sectors, such as the publishing industry supports the sui generis right, while the research and academic sector considers this right to be unclear and too broad and the exceptions to the sui generis to be too restrictive.  In support of the evaluation process, the Commission Services ordered a study from Joint Institute for Innovation Policy (JIIP). The study provided considerable evidence for the Commission's evaluation of the Directive. It contains a legal and an economic analysis, an online survey, in-depth interviews with legal experts and practitioners, and the results of a stakeholders' workshop.

The consultation activities carried out by the EC and the contractor are reported in the synopsis report. The summary report of the EC public consultation was published in October 2017. The Contractor's study also extensively reports in its annexes on the results of the online survey, the in depth interviews and the workshop.

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Rapport de synthèse
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Synopsis report
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Zusammenfassender Bericht
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