Study in support of the evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases : Annex 3: Results of the online survey

The online survey consists of two questionnaires targeting database users, makers and user-makers, and experts. The questionnaire for database users, makers and user-makers was launched on 29th September 2017, and invitations were sent out in several batches. The expert questionnaire followed on 3rd October 2017. The invitations were accompanied by a Recommendation Letter from the European Commission. The invitation process was managed by the survey system. The initial invitation was followed up by two reminders. In total, 237 responses to the survey were received: 145 from database users and makers, and 92 from experts. They include partial responses, that is, not fully completed by respondents. They are nevertheless usable to a large part of the analysis, as these respondents replied to many, if not, most of the questions. Prior to the analysis of the questionnaire, the responses were cleaned. Data from respondents who had submitted empty questionnaires were disregarded, and from those who did not respond to any question relating to their familiarity and experience with the Database Directive and other means of database protection. Responses were also deleted when they were suspected to be inconsistent. For instance, a few respondents provided the same responses to each question, even where doing so did not make any sense. The purpose of this data cleaning process is to prevent the aggregated statistics from being skewed and therefore misleading, and to ensure the accuracy of the subsequent analyses. Once cleaned, the total number of responses to the questionnaire amount to 171, including 105 from database users and/or makers and 66 from experts.