On Legal Protection Of Databases

With the development of computer and database of number-crunching technology, database has amount of information which can be searched swiftly, easy to use. So database has become an indispensable tool in current information-intensive society. Can overstate at all saying, without database, nowadays the internet which has already changed people' s life deeply will fall into paralyzing.Database especially electronic database has enormous social economic worth, but it must invest a large amount of manpower, material resources and financial resources to develop, make and maintain, but it is extremely easy to duplicate. Compared with enormous investment of database producer, the cost of duplicating is extremely low, so it is apt to cause the " hitchhiking " phenomenon. Without the legal protection to database producer, when database is completed anybody can use the content of it at will, he will lose the enthusiasm of investing, thus unfavorable to the development of the industry of database. In the meantime because this is a new field, various countries have already made some preliminary tries, but the real legal protection system to database has not set up yet. So study how to protect the interests of maker, user and public of database, and how to make the interests between the three reach balance, is an important subject to research.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces some basic conception of database. Chapter Two analyses copyright law protection. Chapter Three analyses sui generis right protection in detail. Chapter Four introduces other law protection of database. Chapter Five put forward our country's law protection. At last, we can conclude that we can protect ourdatabase through perfecting our existing law. We can use copyright law to protect the database which has originality, and use anti-appropriate competitive law to protect the database which has not originality. But according to global tendency, setting up particular right law is inevitable.