The availability of databases in the marketplace, that is the volume of their production and their dissemination among users, plays a critical role in economic, technological and cultural progress. In today’s information overload, database technology provides tools in achieving effective dissemination of information. Hence, the public interest demands a stable regime of database protection, which encourages database production and dissemination. Databases are viable tools for the activities of modern society. The support of database development and the guaranty of their public availability are clear policy goals of many governments world-wide.

The legal protection of databases in the European Union is geared towards the removal of legal barriers and establish establishing a Community information market with the broadest availability, and at the same time providing harmonised and adequate legal protection to database makers and providers.

The achievement of the stated goal requires a delicate balance between rights of producers and users’ rights. Database users within this context are also potential producers that wish to enter the database market and wish to do so by building upon existing databases.

The assumption that the higher the protection the greater is database availability is misleading. The objective of any database regime is not to provide the strongest database protection, but the formulation of the optimal level of protection to the benefits of producers and users alike, and to the achievement of the broader extent of database availability.

In this sense, there is a positive correlation between the breadth of the public domain and database availability. This assumption is derived from the nature of databases as a creation based on pre-existing materials. Because it is a derivative creation, the allowable taking from existing materials is significant. Indeed, database producers who wish to build upon existing works may acquire licenses from the stated material owners. However, it is evident that if they can re-use and re-utilise public domain materials, then the investment in the production of a particular database will be lower, thus resulting in setting lower prices for using it. This leads to a conclusion that if many databases can be produced that way, the availability of databases in the marketplace is enhanced. As the result, securing and enlarging the public domain is directly linked to the amount of database production and consumption.

In creating databases, the notion of pre-existing material is explicitly present and not only implied, as in the act of authorship of works. Hence, the precise scope of the public domain that can be employed in creating new databases is essential. Accordingly, a few examples of the legal status concerning such materials will be discussed.

Old works for which the term of copyright had expired are free to be incorporated in databases. Having stated this apparently obvious rule, one should consider the diversity in copyright terms among countries. If a work is still within the copyright term in one country and out of it in another country, then incorporation of such a work in a database product may result in different legal treatment towards this database. When physical objects in which the work is embodied are at issue, this situation is understandable. The owner of copyright in the country in which the work is still copyrighted can exercise his rights by preventing copies of such a work to enter the market. This situation dramatically changes when on-line distribution is concerned.

The concept that ideas are not protected by copyright is one of the fundamental principles of copyright law. Consequently, no copyright infringement occurs when what is taken from the work is its essential idea for composing an independent work in a different form of expression. A further development of this principle is the so called the ‘merger doctrine’ which implies that if there was only one way of expressing an idea, the idea and expression merged. Thus, such an expression is not the subject of copyright.

The titles of books, journal articles and generally, the title of any work is not protected as such by copyright.