Sui generis database protection 2.0: judicial and legislative reforms

The Database Directive’s sui generis database protection is a unique policy experiment by the EU legislature carried out in nineties to incentivize investment in the making and improvement of databases in order to develop an EU information market. 1 Since the two decades of its operation on the ground do not offer the most encouraging results, the European Commission is keen on reforming the tool in the context of its Data Act. 2 Coincidentally, the Court of Justice of the European Union at the same time issued a seminal judgment, CV Online Latvia v Melons3 , that too alters the trajectory of the protection. This article looks at the criticism of the protection, how it is addressed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and what can be done by the European Commission in its upcoming reform. It, therefore, offers a glimpse into sui generis database protection of the second generation.