The Legal Protection of Databases

We live in the Age of Information. Information is money. So is time. The economies of the First World are dominated by the creation, manipulation and use of information and the time it takes to do so. These economies do not suffer from a shortage of information; they suffer from the difficulties associated with collecting, organising, accessing, maintaining and presenting it. Databases are designed to help deal with these difficulties. They are collections of information arranged in such a way that one or more items of information within them may be retrieved by any person with access to the collection containing those items. Therefore, databases are big business because they contain important and copious amounts of information and they reduce the time taken to access that information. And where there is big business, the law and lawyers inevitably follow.

But information is more than money and databases are more than big business. Information and databases are critical to science, the legal system itself, education and all those aspects of life that are improved by them. Consequently, there are important issues of social and political policy to be considered in the regulation of access to, and use of, databases. Again, where there are such critical issues at stake, the law has a role to play.

There is an inevitable tension between the commercial and the socio-political role of databases that leads to complexities in developing an appropriate model for their legal protection.