Databases have always been commodities of both commercial value and social utility, ranging from their early incarnation in the eighteenth century as directories compiled by walking door to door to the late twentieth-century compendiums of millions of items in electronic form. The question of whether and how databases should be protected by the law has never been easy, as it necessarily involves finding a balance between two potentially conflicting societal goals: the goal of providing adequate incentives for their continued production, and the goal of ensuring public access to the...

U.S. copyright laws have protected computer software for many years, and today that regime of legal protection supports an industry that is a major engine of economic growth. In the last quarter century, the software industry has added millions of jobs and increased the U.S. gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars. Software has transformed our way of life, paving the way for personal computers, video games, digital photography, the internet, music and movie streaming services, smartphones, the Internet of Things, cryptocurrencies, and self-driving cars. In the near future,...