Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

of resources that qualifies that portion of the collection forprotection,”168 and (2) that “the person claiming protection bearsthe burden of proving “that the date on which the portion of thecollection that was made available or extracted was firstoffered . . . in commerce . . . was no more than fifteen years priorto the time when it was made available or extracted by thedefendant.”169 H.R. 354 also states that “[n]o monetary reliefshall be available . . . [if the defendant] could not reasonablydetermine whether the date on which the portion of the collectionthat was made available or extracted was first offered incommerce” was more than 15 years prior to the violation.170Where “a collection of information into which all or a substantialpart of a government collection of information isincorporated, . . . no monetary relief shall be available for aviolation . . . unless a statement appear[s] . . . in a manner andlocation so as to give reasonable notice, identifying thegovernment collection and the government entity from which itwas obtained.”171In short, whereas the EU Database Directive appears tomandate dynamic (i.e., continuing) protection for an entiredatabase that is the subject of cumulatively substantial updating,H.R. 354 would protect only those substantial portions of adatabase that can be shown to have been offered in commercewithin the last fifteen years, and would deny monetary reliefwhere the defendant could not reasonably distinguish old and newdata, or in the case of collections incorporating informationcollected by the government, was not given reasonable notificationof the government source. Here, too, the difference in the scope ofprotection mandated by the EU Directive and that provided forunder H.R. 354 raises the question whether the European Councilwould consider the two to be comparable.2. H.R. 1858In contrast to both H.R. 354 and the EU Database Directive,H.R. 1858 is a much more narrowly tailored bill, which would (1)prevent wholesale competitive duplication of databases and (2)168. Id.169. Id. § 1409(d).170. H.R. 354 § 1408(a), 106th Cong. (1999).171. Id. § 1408(b).