Re-Defining the Rights and Responsibilities of Database Owners Under Competition Law

Singapore protects databases under copyright law. While copyright may be conceptually malleable enough to protect databases, stretching copyright over these factual compilations may be a rough and incomplete solution to regulating access. The EU Database Directive makes a clearer delineationbetween banal and expressive works, but suffers similar shortcomings while adding new ones with its sui generis right. This article reviews key developments affecting databases in the EU, US and Singapore, and suggests that competition law, with an inbuilt economic framework for determining compulsory access, offers an alternative that may better reflect the commercial expectations of database owners. However, for competition law to properly regulate databases, it is important that stakeholders are aware of analytical pitfalls in order to avoid penalising legitimate exercise of IPRs in databases