The United Kingdom has implemented the EU Directive on Legal Protection of Databases (described in our August 1996 Newsletter (N.S. 187) by way of secondary legislation, promulgating regulations under the European Communities Act rather than by amending the primary copyright legislation. This may result in some inconsistencies. The Directive requires that databases be protected as literary works but only if "by reason of the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database it constitutes its author's own intellectual creation". The U.K. regulations follow this definition. However, the pre-existing U.K. law already provides protection for a "table or compilation" as a literary work and the courts have held that for example a list of football matches qualifies for protection. Such a list may not be an "intellectual creation". Problems could therefore arise in such a case and also where the database is created by a computer (computer-created works being protectible by copyright in the United Kingdom, although not in most other countries), since it is unclear whether a computer is capable of "intellectual creation".

The second limb of the Directive called for creation of a right for the owner of a database to control extraction of data from the protected database, although such protection only exists if the owner of the database is a national or resident of an EU member state or of a country granting reciprocal rights to nationals or residents of EU member states. The British regulations provide that this right is infringed by those who without authorization extract or reutilize all or a substantial part of a protected database or who carry out a repeated or systematic extraction of insubstantial parts of a database.

The regulations came into effect on January 1, 1998. ivities were held to constitute trademark infringement according to the statutory definition.