THE DATABASE DILEMMA: RESOLVING THE CONFLICT BETWEEN DATA ERASURE RIGHTS AND PROPRIETARY TRADE SECRETS

The permanence of digital information has generated one of the most complex conflicts in modern commercial law: the tension between a data principal’s statutory right to privacy and an enterprise’s intellectual property rights. This report provides an in-depth doctrinal and comparative analysis of the “Database Dilemma” – the legal clash that occurs when a person, particularly a former senior executive, exercises his right to erasure or data portability under law, and the company claims that complying with the request would disturb its copyrighted database structure or expose confidential trade secrets. The paper critically examines Section 12 and Section 7(i) of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, in juxtaposition with the protection provided to sui generis databases under Section 2(o) of the Copyright Act, 1957 and the mandate to protect undisclosed commercial information under Article 39 of the TRIPS Agreement, based on the Indian legal framework. This report synthesises a proportionality framework by reviewing the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To summarise, the right to erasure, while absolute in intent, must be harmonised with intellectual property laws, through rigorous necessity tests, cryptographic pseudonymisation and contractual abstraction of analytical methodologies as found in modern enterprise terms of service.