abstracts

I'd be interested to learn about the copyright treatment of abstracts of articles from scientific journals and conference proceedings elsewhere in the world. To start the ball rolling, in England an abstract would presumably be considered a copyright literary work provided of course it was original (in the usual limited sense of not copied). Given that an abstract will normally be a boiled-down version of the larger work, and contains mostly ideas and little expression, many abstracts might be excluded from copyright protection to begin with.

However, by section 60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, it is not an infringement of copyright in an abstract (not defined) or in the abstracted article to sopy the abstract or to issue copies of it to the public, unless there is a certified licensing scheme in force covering the abstracts in question. (Whether there is such a scheme in force is another matter.)

There is also the small matter of copyright in a collection of abstracts from a conference or a journal, in which copyright may subsist if (assuming it is a database) it is its author's own intellectual creation (unlikely, I think) or (not being a database but an ordinary garden variety compilation) it involved skill labour and judgment (which is more likely, but still not a foregone conclusion). There is also the sui generis database right, which might entitle the compiler of the database, if it had made a substantial investment in it, to stop unauthorised extraction or reutilisation of a substantial part of the database. So the use of a number of abstracts from a database or collection may infringe rights in the database or collection intself.

Presumably, I can rely on the laws in other EC countries relating to databases being pretty similar, though I don't know what the state of implementation of the database directive is.

Peter Groves
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