Bernt Hugenholtz (IViR): Goodbye, Geschriftenbescherming!
"On February 11, 2013 the Government published a draft bill that would remove a single word (‘all’) from the text of Article 10(1) of the Dutch Copyright, and thereby put this relic of a distant past finally to rest."
"Besides tulips, cheese, football and other recreational matters, the Netherlands are famous for its copyright protection of non-original writings. Geschriftenbescherming, as the Dutch call this legal anomaly (and only they know how to pronounce it), is a remnant of an ancient eighteenth-century printer’s right that lives on until this day in the Dutch Copyright Act of 1912. Deviating from the idea of author’s right (droit d’auteur) to which Dutch law otherwise subscribes, the Dutch Act protects ‘writings’ that do not meet the test of originality. (...) More controversially, the Dutch public broadcasting organizations for many years successfully invoked geschriftenbescherming to monopolize the market for radio and television guides. In more recent times, copyright protection of non-original writings also became a popular instrument for protecting computerized databases, even after the EU’s Database Directive of 1996 harmonized database copyright according to the standard of the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’. (...) After last year’s Football Dataco decision by the Court of Justice (CJEU, 1 March 2012, Case C-604/10) it was clear that maintaining geschriftenbescherming for databases was untenable.
Lees het gehele bericht hier (KluwerCopyrightBlog).
