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Radical legal innovations in intellectual property protection have been introduced by the little noticed European Database Directive of March 1996. This initiative, part of the larger institutional transformations initiated in response to the economic ramifications of rapid progress in digital information technologies, poses numerous contentious issues in law and economics. These are likely to create ambiguities for business and non-profit activities in this area for years to come, and the terms on which those issues are resolved will materially affect the costs and organizational feasibility of scientific projects that are of global reach and significance. This is the case especially in fields such as geology, oceanography and climatology, which depend heavily upon the collection, management and analysis of large volumes of observational data that cannot be regenerated. More generally the conduct of open, collaborative science – along with many of the benefits that flow from it for the developed and the developing economies alike – may be seriously jeopardized by the consequences of the new database protections. This raises the spectre of a new and different "tragedy of the commons," one created by continuing the unbalanced pressure to extract greater economic rents by means of controlling access to information. "Over-fencing," which is to say, the erection of artificial cost barriers to the production of reliable public knowledge by means of reliable public knowledge, threatens the future of "the public knowledge commons" that historically has proved critically important for rapid advance in science and technology.