I had a longer discussion with our legal department concerning this issue and by and large they confirmed what we already discussed here:
- There is no copyright on the nucleotide and amino acid sequences themselves.
- There is no copyright on gene/segment names. However, they theoretically could be protected by a trademark. Such a protection would most likely be void since it must not be descriptive (e.g. preexisting gene name) and linked to a product or service of the trademark owner.
- Under EU law the collection and curation of a non-trivial database creates a protected work, even if it contains only free material.
- Recreating such a database starting from free material does not violate the protection [as granted in (3)] even if it finally contains similar content. However, material from the protected database must not be copied in the process.
- In case IMGT should decide to take legal action against a competing database (claiming that protected material was copied and used without permission), the owner/operator should be able to show how the competing database was derived from the free material without resorting to protected data from IMGT.
Please note that the context of my discussion was limited to the “possible legal risks/IP violations when setting up a public database for Ig/TCR segment information under a free/open license”, since I considered this to be the most likely scenario. Furthermore, I assumed that IMGT’s current claims are actually valid (although it seems like this is not necessarily the usual thing to do).