Goodbye, Geschriftenbescherming!

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Thus, in the Netherlands producers of telephone directories, address books, almanacs and catalogs have always enjoyed copyright protection against unauthorized reproduction. More controversially, the Dutch public broadcasting organizations for many years successfully invoked geschriftenbescherming to monopolize the market for radio and television guides. In more recent times, copyright protection of non-original writings also became a popular instrument for protecting computerized databases, even after the EU’s Database Directive of 1996 harmonized database copyright according to the standard of the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’.

After last year’s Football Dataco decision by the Court of Justice (CJEU, 1 March 2012, Case C-604/10) it was clear that maintaining geschriftenbescherming for databases was untenable. Following the recommendations of the Dutch Copyright Committee, the Government has now announced its intention to abolish geschriftenbescherming – not only for databases, but across the board. On February 11, 2013 the Government published a draft bill that would remove a single word (‘all’) from the text of Article 10(1) of the Dutch Copyright, and thereby put this relic of a distant past finally to rest. Farewell, geschriftenbescherming!