Text and Data Mining exception for researchers
On the 14 September 2016, on the occasion of President Juncker’s 2016 State of the Union address, the European Commission has come up with proposals on the modernisation of copyright in order to increase the cultural diversity in Europe and content available online.
The Commission has adopted proposals, as a key part of the Digital Single Market strategy, presented in May 2015. These proposals complement the proposed regulation on portability of legal content (December 2015), the revised Audiovisual Media and Services Directive, the Communication on online platforms (May 2016).
The proposal is based on three main priorities:
The proposed Directive is supposed to make it easier for researchers across the EU to use text and data mining (TDM) technologies which will allow them to analyse large sets of data, that they have already lawfully acquired or accessed. This is revolutionary in that a lot of scientific publications are nowadays are digital. Text and data mining will allow researchers to discover new innovative solutions to major challenges more rapidly.
When it comes to accessing journal articles, EU research ministers have endorsed a move to abandon the traditional journal subscription model and embrace freely-available scientific research by 2020, in May this year.
However, there is a downside to this modernisation as the scope for commercial mining is quite limited, i.e. companies may download and analyse large amounts of data only when cooperating with universities and research institutes. This might potentially make Europe less attractive to start-ups relying on such text and data mining. Citizens, freelancers, journalists and other will also not receive the right to TDM.
The Proposal for Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market can be found here.
The Communication on Promoting a fair, efficient and competitive European copyright-based economy in the Digital Single Market can be found here.
