An Economic Analysis of Policies for the Protection and Reuse of Noncopyrightable Database Contents.

Author List: Zhu, Hongwei; Madnick, Stuart E.; Siegel, Michael D.;
Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008, Volume 25, Issue 1, Page 199-232.
The availability of data on the Web and new data extraction technologies have made it increasingly easy to reuse existing data to create new databases and provide value-added services. Meanwhile, database creators have been seeking legal protection for their data, such as the European Union's Database Directive. The legislative development shows that there is significant difficulty in finding the right balance between protecting the incentives of creating publicly accessible databases (including semistructured Web sites) and preserving adequate access to factual data for value-creating activities. We address this issue using an extended spatial competition model that explicitly considers licensing provisions and inefficiencies in policy administration. The results show that, depending on the cost level of database creation, the degree of differentiation of the reuser database, and the efficiency of policy administration, there are different socially beneficial policy choices, such as protecting a legal monopoly, encouraging competition via compulsory licensing, discouraging voluntary licensing, or even allowing free riding. With the appropriate policy in place, both the creators and the reusers should focus on innovation that can increase the variety of databases and create value from database contents.
Keywords: data reuse; database protection; intellectual property; noncopyrightable data
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#126 0.201 data database administration important dictionary organizations activities record increasingly method collection records considered perturbation requirements special level efforts administrators analyzed
#61 0.173 reuse results anchoring potential strategy assets leading reusability incentives impact bias situations effect similarity existing extraction reusable improvement necessary enhancing
#190 0.135 new licensing license open comparison type affiliation perpetual prior address peer question greater compared explore competing crowdsourcing provide choice place
#201 0.096 piracy goods digital property intellectual rights protection presence legal consumption music consumers enforcement publisher pirate producers policies copyright provision profits
#5 0.093 consumer consumers model optimal welfare price market pricing equilibrium surplus different higher results strategy quality cost lower competition firm paper
#281 0.091 database language query databases natural data queries relational processing paper using request views access use matching automated semantic based languages
#84 0.065 electronic markets commerce market new efficiency suppliers internet changes marketplace analysis suggests b2b marketplaces industry examine easy product making physical