Crowdsourced Databases and Sui Generis Rights
This work tackles legal protection problems for database creators and users in Europe, but it is incremental as it builds on existing debates without presenting new empirical results.
The paper introduces the concept of crowdsourced databases to address legal protection issues for databases in Europe, summarizing the existing legal framework and practices to contextualize the proposal.
In this study we propose a new concept of databases (crowdsourced databases), adding a new conceptual approach to the debate on legal protection of databases in Europe. We also summarise the current legal framework and current indexing and web scraping practices - it would not be prudent to suggest a new theory without contextualising it in the legal and practical context in which it is developed.