공공데이터베이스 이용법리의 재검토

The current Korean Copyright Act gives some exclusive rights to database producer. This protection, notwithstanding creativity standard to protect copyright as a compilation work, is given due to substantial investment in its production. The right can be categorized as the neighbouring right granted to a performer, a phonogram producer or a broadcasting entity The right can be characterized as a sui-generis right with property law principles, which means that Database is not in public domain and cannot be exploited without authorization However, it is not clear whether the Copyright Act and the National Property Act authorize the government to have and manage public sector database. Therefore it needs to be studied that some exclusive rights given to public sector database producer, such as the government and public organizations, are equivalent to rights of private sector database producer under the Copyright Act. If some exclusive rights are entitled to public sector database producer like database producer under the Copyright Act, the government would have the exclusive rights and users have to ask permission to exploite public sector database abiding by The National Property Act(from government before exploiting the public sector database according to the National Property Act). The National Property Act regulates or controls of licensing the national property because use of national property can be unreasonable to the public interest and unfair to another user. But use of public sector database is different to the national property. Thus the Copyright Act and the National Property law should not be applied to the public sector database. The public sector database is collected and managed for public interest, not for pecuniary profit, so has to be used by people in general including private enterprises except in the case that the database includes personal information or national security secrecy). Therefore, lawmaking reform governing using public sector database should be done in order to advance the public information policies in the actual administrative field.