<div dir="ltr"><div>There is fairly limited case law on what constitutes "substantial investment" under the database law. Here is an article discussing a couple of cases where significant investment was rejected, and one where it was accepted (sadly all in the context of sports, not geodata) - <a href="https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ddc63c34-a49f-4876-86d5-aaec83d65ed1">https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ddc63c34-a49f-4876-86d5-aaec83d65ed1</a></div><div>Best,</div><div>Kathleen<br></div><div><br></div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 1:48 PM Martin Koppenhoefer <<a href="mailto:dieterdreist@gmail.com">dieterdreist@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br>
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sent from a phone<br>
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> On 11. Jul 2019, at 20:23, Kathleen Lu <<a href="mailto:kathleen.lu@mapbox.com" target="_blank">kathleen.lu@mapbox.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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> "Substantial investment" may not be a black and white standard, but it is a meaningful one. I hypothesize that Tesco would have difficulty proving "a substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents." (Note that investment in creating/setting the hours does not count.)<br>
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It may have come along as sarcasm the way I have written it, but the idea is actually appealing: significant investment wrt the database could eventually be dismissed for those databases, which are more or less the result of some related operation/work, a byproduct, rather than being set up to gather and analyze data without being required in the operation. The investment would be the operation, while the db as a byproduct would be almost “free”. The OpenStreetMap database would still be protected under perspective, but a lot of databases would not be protected automatically any more. <br>
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The maps the GIS department releases are definitely requiring a significant investment, but the lists of streets a municipality releases would probably not be covered by the sui generis rule because there is not much specific investment behind such a compilation, it is a byproduct of their operation as a public administration. Or the post code lists of the postal service: the effort is not specifically put into the db, they only have to print what they already know from planning and organizing the postal service.<br>
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Is there already case law with examples where a claimed significant investment has been rejected? I would suspect that almost any database could be seen as having required a lot of investment for the creation and updates, or not, according to how you put it. <br>
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>From a practical point of view I agree I would not be worried about copying opening hours (or addresses, or phone numbers) from a retail company’s website, e.g. Tesco. It’s more likely they would pay you for this than sue you.<br>
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Cheers Martin </blockquote></div>