as such, a type of ownership that the copyright paradigm expressly precludes. The drafters of the sui generis right play this down by insisting that third parties always remain free to generate their own databases. But this opportunity exists only for data that are legally available from public sources and whose cost of independent regeneration is not prohibitively high in relation to the gains expected from the exercise, if any. As for proprietary data not legally available for second comers to exploit, there is no opportunity to avoid the originator's exclusive rights to prevent extraction or reuse of existing data. In such cases, the investor's exclusive rights necessarily vest in the data as such. A deeper point is that, regardless of whether it Is possible n theory to regenerate the data from publicly available sources, investors in database production can always deny 1thir parties the right to use preexisting data in value-added applications,⁸ even when the third parties are willing to succumb to royalty-bearing licenses;⁹ and there is no escaping such licenses unless the database publisher either declines to exercise his or her rights, or engages in an abusive exercise of market power. In other words, except when the new proprietary rights are abandoned or misused, the concept of incremental or "cumulative and sequential innovation," which is central to the development of modern technological paradigms,¹⁰ has been banished from the universe of database production, despite the economic waste and inefficiency inherent in such policies. A second; and closely related way In which the database investor's scope of protection under the 1998 European Directive exceeds that of authors under the classical copyright paradigm is to be seen in the treatment of derivative works. Under copyright laws, the scope of an authors exclusive right to make a derivative work extends only to the original, expressive matter added to the underlying work. It cannot protect either ideas or preexisting expressive matter, including any matter that has entered the public domain,¹¹ But the 1996 Directive recognizes no such legal distinction and, as just explained, it harbors no working conception of a public domain whatsoever. Unless local European courts applying the domestic laws that implement the Directive take pains to limit this omission, the upshot will be that each new extension of the database makers exclusive rights by dint of his or her "substantial investment” updates, additions, and revisions¹² will, in effect, requalify that investor for protection of the database as a whole, for additional 15-year periods, and not just for the revised or added matter—the “derivative work”—as would occur under the copyright laws. This, in turn, reinforces the monopolistic