It all depends on the context. Many small websites were threatened with legal action if they displayed more than a couple of weeks' worth of football (soccer) fixtures on their site. The claim was that the data was part of a copyrighted database.
Luckily (and advsior at) the ECJ saw it differently. I don't think it has been officially challenged in court yet...
If it's a taxpayer-funded database it ought to be free. However, privately created databases shouldn't necessarily be free.. It costs money to assemble data, even public records, so for someone to do the work of compilation and have that work be unprotected will provide a disincentive for people to create the databases in the first place.
I agree with the sentiment that tax funded data should be free. But in practice it is more complicated. American Government data seems to either be free and open access or completely restricted for security reasons. In the EU publicly funded projects tend to require payment but have better data availability. This is particularly obvious with remote sensing satellites where the NASA/USGS budget for public-good projects is severely restricted. Payment at the right price is not always a bad thing if it makes projects viable. Especially when they wouldn't be viable without asking for payment from end users.
Coming from Germany, my opinion is, that the question is, which lobby is the strongest at the moment, these laws are conceived.
The EU is (imho) not really much more, than an undemocratic playing field for industrial lobbies. Nearly nobody cares for the EU parliament (the only elected body in the EU).
If some countries have a strong law in some cases - and can convince (or blackmail) others, to go the same route - good for everybody, when it comes EU-"law". But if the EU goes the pro industry, contra people-way... bad for everybody.
Just my two cents, after watching for more then ten years and seeing this stuff happen again and again...
You mean the only elected body with EU wide reach. There are many more elected bodies within the EU but their reach is limited to smaller chunks of geography.
And even the EU parliament does not actually have reach across the EU because not all countries have ratified the same set of rules. So it's possible for countries to have seats in the EU parliament which passes laws which then do not affect some of those countries in the same way. It's quite messy.
Luckily (and advsior at) the ECJ saw it differently. I don't think it has been officially challenged in court yet...
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2011/december/football-fi...