Protection of the Content of a 'Wiki' Database Under the European Database Directive

Following the success of the free Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, many entities have discovered Wiki-based databases as a practicable solution to gather and administer content. Millions of volunteers around the world contribute to Wikipedia and other Wiki-based websites by adding and editing information. In Luxembourg, the Wiki-based WikiFood.eu website was launched in 2006 in order to set up a database of food ingredients data in a machine-readable way. WikiFood built up a volunteer network of food product users that help to expand the database by typing in the ingredients lists of products that may be interesting for the community of allergy patients and consumers. Anyone who has registered to wikifood and accepted the terms of use may edit or contribute to WikiFood, and the contribution is immediately available worldwide. One idea behind WikiFood was, that one day the provider might be able to sell the collected data to a presumably commercial entity which will market the parallel developed barcode-reading smartphone, the so-called Personal Allergy Assistant, and respective Smartphone Apps, which are able to scan a food package's EAN barcode and provide information on ingredients. Both, the PAA and the Apps are dependent on acquiring relevant information from the food ingredients database. In this context it is of interest whether intellectual property rights in a wiki-based database, in specific the WikiFood compilation of information, exist, and if so what scope they have