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b)Method of protection of contract law. In his service to the public, the compiler of database may conclude contracts with users for offering information service from database. In this way the compiler can protect the contents of his database and his right of petition upon remuneration.
c)Method of protection of business secret. What is business secret, the Law Against Unfair Competition of China defines in item 3 of article 10 that business secret in this article means technical information and operational information which is not known to the public, which is capable of bringing economic benefits to the owner of rights, which has practical applicability and which the owner of rights has taken measures to keep secret.”17In practice, many compilers provide only retrieval service to the content of their database for the sake of protecting the data security. As to the whole or essential data of the database the compiler often take some encrypting techniques to prevent from unauthorized visit to their database. If there have been infringement upon the business secret in database the compiler may protect their database by applying the law against unfair competition.
But in practical operation the protecting methods above mentioned will also be faced with some problems, e.g. it seems rather farfetched for a library to use the anti-unfair competition law to protect its database for the subject in the law against unfair competition is the operator engaging in the trading of goods or profit-making services. Library, as a non-profit and commonweal organization providing culture and information service to the public, is obviously not a subject suitable in this law; furthermore, it is not the purpose for a library to seek profits.
Judicial protection to database in China
In recent years, courts in China have heard several cases relating to copyright disputes, of which the Guangxi Broadcast & TV Newspaper v. Guangxi Coal Miner Newspaper 18 is typical one. In this case the complainant brought a suit against defendant of infringing upon his copyright by reprinting his TV Program List without permission. The first instance court deems that the TV program list belongs to the sphere of news on current affairs and has no copyright on it, any news media or individual may, subject to the copyright law, use it freely, and plaintiff’s action was rejected. But the appellate court holds that the TV program list has, in copyright sense, no originality and is not suitable for protection with copyright law. But considering that the list is made through the complicated work that is full with professional labor, the civil right plaintiff enjoys over his labor product should be protected by law. The court decides finally that the defendant has infringed upon the plaintiff’s civil right and shall bear civil liability. In this case the key problem is to clarify the nature and legal status of TV program list. Speaking technically, TV program list may be considered as a database simple in both structure and content. The legal significance stemming from the case explicates that databases, either is an original work or a labor product having no originality but containing quantities of labor and capitals, can be protected by copyright law and other civil law respectively.
Database copyright and digital library
Database, as provided by the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Legal Protection of Database 19 passed in 1996, “shall mean a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means.” As a storehouse of information, database can provide diversified information to the public. Therefore, it is an important part in the construction of digitalized resources of digital libraries. In the course of developing a database the digital library will be faced with two problems with respect to copyright, one is the copyright protection to the work or parts of work selected and compiled in database; the other is copyright protection to the entire database.
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