A legal right over intellectual property (e.g. a book) belonging to the creator of the work. While individual data (facts) cannot be copyright, a database will in general be covered by copyright protecting the selection and arrangement of data within it. Within the European Union separate ‘database rights’ protect a database where there was a substantial effort in ‘obtaining’ the data. A copyright holder may use a licence to grant other people rights in the protected material, perhaps subject to specified restrictions.

Source: ODH