Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

competition which would justify appropriate measures beingtaken, including the establishment of non-voluntary licensingarrangements.”15The emergence of two competing bills in the United StatesCongress suggests that the reciprocity provision of the EUDatabase Directive is skewing the U.S. debate over databaseprotection, just as it was intended to do. Nor is the United Statesin much of a position to protest this use of a reciprocity provisionthat foists off a new form of intellectual property protection on anunwilling world, as the United States itself used precisely thesame tactic in 1984 to induce the rest of the world to create suigeneris protection for semiconductor chip designs.16 Perhaps thebest one can hope for is that the legislative stalemate in Congressmight continue until either the economic consequences of the EUDatabase Directive or the legality of its reciprocity provision, orboth, can be determined. However, U.S. congressional leaders aresaid to have already decided that a database bill will beintroduced in the current session of Congress, and negotiationswith the committee staffs responsible for H.R. 354 and H.R. 1858have begun.17 The question is what sort of database bill the15. EU Database Directive, supra note 4, at art. 16(3). It appears that the EU’sconcerns were not unfounded. See Commission Decision 01/165/EC of 3 July 2001,Case COMP D3/38.044—NDC Health/IMS Health: Interim measures, 2002 O.J. (L 59)18 (granting interim measures requiring sales data company to license its copyrighteddatabase structure to its competitors based on a finding of abuse of its dominantposition). However, this decision was later suspended by the President of the Court ofFirst Instance pending further examination upon appeal; see Order T-184/01 R 2 (Oct.26, 2001), available at http://curia.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en; see also ECCompetition Policy Newsletter, Feb., 2002, at 61, available athttp://europa.eu.int/comm/competition/publications/cpn/cpn2002_1.pdf.16. See Charles R. McManis, Taking TRIPS on the Information Superhighway:International Intellectual Property Protection and Emerging Computer Technology, 41Vill. L. Rev. 207, 258-59 (1996) [hereinafter McManis, Taking TRIPS]; Charles R.McManis, International Protections for Semiconductor Chip Designs and the Standardof Judicial Review of Presidential Proclamations Issued Pursuant to the SemiconductorChip Protection Act of 1984, 22 Geo. Wash. J. Int’l L. & Econ. 331, 338-39 (1988).17. See Robert MacMillan, House Committees Try To Thaw Database Bill Freeze,Newsbytes (Mar. 29, 2001) (reporting the reopening of discussions to try to fashion acommon database intellectual property bill out of the two conflicting bills), athttp://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/163826.html; Washington Affairs Office, Am. Ass’nof Law Libraries, House Legislation to Protect Databases (July 2001) (reporting on 8weekly meetings, co-hosted by House Judiciary Committee Chairman JamesSensenbrenner and House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin,between proponents and opponents of database legislation), available athttp://www.ll.Georgetown.edu/aallwash/ib0720012.html.