Data publishing and copyright protection

With the advancement of open science, copyright issues have become increasingly prominent in data sharing. Copyright protection serves as both an incentive and an obstacle to data sharing; its objective and challenge lie in balancing the dissemination of shared data with the rights of stakeholders. Data can be categorized by its generation type into raw data, compiled data, and adapted/derived data; by ownership type, it can be classified as personal data, corporate data, and public data. The subject of copyright protection is original, reproducible intellectual creations. Data copyright encompasses not only personal rights such as ownership and usage rights, but also property rights including transfer rights and profit rights. Whether data can be regarded as a product of creativity is one of the focal points of data copyright protection. Legal frameworks such as copyright law, patent law, and anti-unfair competition law provide fundamental safeguards for data copyright protection. In the field of data publishing, employing data usage license agreements and unique identifiers are effective means to protect data copyright. However, numerous data copyright-related cases warrant further analysis and resolution, including: such as whether digitizing books constitutes infringement, how to determine ownership of data scraped by web crawlers, how to enforce rights when data is misused or replicated on other websites for profit, attribution issues for works created in the course of employment or collaborative data, handling methods for preemptively published results, and countermeasures when data is modified and republished.