Gerald M. DiGiusto
APSA 2005
## email not listed ##
Submitted 18 August 2005
bill and then again as a rider to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a broader effort
to update intellectual property regulation for the digital environment. A House-Senate
conference on the DMCA in October 1998 excised H.R. 2652 from the joint proposal.
There
was no further action on database protection in the 105
th
Congress.
The following session of Congress proved the most active yet with respect to database
legislation. During the 106
th
Congress (1999-2000), two database bills were introduced, each
offering a different approach to the regulation of compilations. The first bill, H.R. 354: “The
Collections of Information Piracy Act,” emerged from the House Judiciary Committee in
January 1999 and resembled earlier Congressional efforts at database protection. In essence, it
sought to “protect the investment in databases by restoring the sweat of the brow doctrine and
ensuring protection for U.S. publishers under the EU Database Directive through the
establishment of a comparable regime here.”
This legislation, like its earlier incarnations, garnered the support of the database
publishing community, both domestically and internationally. For example, the Agricultural
Publishers Association, an association of small U.S. publishers that provides databases to the
farming sector, testified that database piracy – which they argued was legal in the absence of
domestic law explicitly prohibiting it – put U.S. agricultural publishers and farmers at a
competitive disadvantage to European competitors. Lynn Henderson, president of Doane
Agricultural Services Company, a member of the Agricultural Publishers Association argued that
In today's global economy, we have real, possible markets beyond our national
borders […] which we are currently unable to develop because of the lack of
protection. For example, a European grain buyer watching and planning his next
move would benefit greatly from access to Doane’s information services
concerning American farm products. Although, today, we could expand our
services via the Internet, we cannot realistically pursue this avenue until
legislation is enacted to protect our databases; and if this is not done soon, these
markets may be lost to us. Last year’s European Union directive gave European
72
Band, "The Database Protection Debate in the United States," 3.
73
Ibid.: 4.
29
Convention