Recent French decisions on database protection: Towards a more consistent and compliant approach with the Court of Justice's case law?

Since the official date of implementation of the Database Directive, namely 1 January 1998, 14 years have now already passed. During this decade and a half, French courts have handed down around 30 decisions on database protection. [2] Between 1998 and 2004, the year when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its first four parallel rulings on the sui generis right, the French case law on the sui generisright was quite erratic. [3] Admittedly, such state of affairs was not dissimilar in other Member States owing to the sheer novelty of the sui generis right and the vagueness of many of the Database Directive’s provisions. While the sui generis right was meant to replace the tort of slavish copying still existing in many Member States on the continent, French decisions fluctuated between cumulating the two actions and thus repairing the same damage twice, and rejecting the overlap. Since its 2004 rulings, the CJEU handed down two more decisions mainly confirming its case law on infringement. [4] One more was handed down earlier this year on the issue of originality for database copyright but also on the relationship between copyright and similar types of protection for databases. [5]