Copyright Law, Database Compilation Right

Article 7, XIII protects a database, along with a collection, compilation, anthology, encyclopedia, or dictionary, as an intellectual creation where its selection, organization, or arrangement of content amounts to one, and article 7, § 2º expressly states that this protection does not cover the underlying data or materials themselves and is without prejudice to any copyright that subsists in that data.

Article 87 gives the holder of the patrimonial right over a database the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit reproducing it in whole or in part, translating, adapting, reorganizing, or otherwise modifying it, distributing the original or copies, or communicating it to the public, and reproducing, distributing, or communicating the results of such a modification.

Because the protection reaches only the database's selection and arrangement, and not the data itself, Brazil has no sui generis, investment-based extraction right of the kind the European Union's Database Directive creates, and the Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists.