New Expansion of Copyright

The principle has a lot of merit.
If you're offering a database of job ads or maintaining a list of local restaurants, you'd probably be pissed to find someone crawling your site with a spider to offer this information to their visitors, wouldn't you?

Under German jurisdiction, this law (which we've had for a quite a while now) also covers link lists, which are not covered by author's right (Germany does not have "copyright"). If you're providing a carefully maintained link list on your site, you would probably be miffed if someone just copied it.

did the collectors pay for the data they collected?
So a company browses a mass of information on the web and puts it all in a database.
Costs them a bit of computertime (and the cost of the hardware and software involved which can be reused).

Now they suddenly own that information without needing even the consent of the person or organisation that originally created that data?

I CAN see where the data is owned by the company in question if it is their own data which they input (they either created it themselves or paid for it from those who did create it).
But under those restrictions the data is already protected under the copyright act.

What this bill does is take the ownership of anything you put on the web away from the copyright owner and puts it in the hand of the person or company with the foresight and resources to catalogue your work...
I wonder if they could come back later and sue the original creator for continuing to publish something that's in their database, but I wouldn't be surprised if such is the case...