Dutch news paper NRC published an article today about a court case that concerned the use of product information from a competitor’s webshop without the competitor’s permission. The article is written by journalist Nelleke van der Heiden. In the article, I briefly comment on the case.
What was the case about?
For almost 15 years, Tracpartz has been collecting information on spare parts for mini tractors. This trader keeps precise records of which (other) brands/types of mini tractors the parts in question can be applied to. The trader lists this product information in its webshop, in addition to the compatibility information provided by the manufacturer of the spare part. A competing webshop adopts the trader’s product information. The trader disagrees and tries to stop this through the courts, invoking database rights. The trader also believes that the competitor is guilty of an unlawful act or unjust enrichment.
The District Court of Northern Netherlands did not follow the trader’s opinion and rejected the claims. The Court ruled that the trader did not prove that it had made a substantial investment in the database, which is required under the Databases Act [Databankenwet]. The use of the product information is also not unlawful, according to the court, as no additional circumstances have been demonstrated. Nor could the trader prove unjust enrichment.
My comments
In the article, I provide my comment about this court case. Among other things, I discuss that factual information in itself is not protected (e.g. under copyright) and that in this particular case there was no protected database:
“It may sound unfair that someone can just use information you painstakingly collected, but this data is not protected in any way,” says lawyer Evert van Gelderen of Clairfort Attorneys-at-law. “Factual data, there are no rights on that, even if you have put effort into it.”
The judge quickly dismissed the claim that the database was protected. So should this trader have thrown it on copyright? That does not apply here either, says the lawyer specialising in intellectual property. Copyright requires creativity. “The threshold is low, but creative choices must have been made, for example in sentence structure,” he says. And that is not the case with factual product information.
The article can be read on NRC.nl
Read the entire NRC article here: ‘A trader completely copies his competitor’s product information. Is that allowed just like that?‘ (in Dutch only!)
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