Notes

Starting Point:

• Commission's Communication, towards a thriving data - driven economy, COM(2014) 442 Final.
• Data - Driven Economy (DDE), i.e., "capacity of businesses and public sector bodies to make use of information from improved data analytics to develop improved services and goods that facilitate everyday life of individuals and of organizations, including SMEs".

The importance of text and data mining for the DDE

• 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and 90% of the data in today's world has been created in the last two years.
• The volume of data is doubling every three years (Big Data at the Speed of Business, New York, IBM, 2014).
• Facebook users alone share over 30 million pieces of content per month, and Twitter has 350 million tweets per day.
• The global academic and research community generates over 1.5 million new scholarly articles annually; and there are an estimated 50 million academic articles in circulation since 2010.

What is Text and Data Mining? Can you give me a definition? "Text and Data Mining (TDM) is the process of deriving information from machine-read material. It works by copying large quantities of material, extracting the data, and recombining it to identify patterns [trends and correlations]".

Where is the problem? It is not clear whether TDM infringes copyright! In particular, in most jurisdictions the law is unclear about whether:

• TDM is a copyright relevant act.
• Permission is required from rights owners. Meanwhile, publishers and other content providers limit TDM through contracts.

Within the EU instead

• We adopted a very narrow exception for TDM.
• Before getting to the TDM exception, let's have a look at the interplay between copyright and TDM.

Let's unpack TDM

• Input Selection (Dataset Creation).
  • Creative vs Non-Creative Works, i.e. out of copyright works vs in-copyright works.
• Pre-Processing: adapting the format to operational needs.
• Applying the mining tools.
• Output presentation.

What infringes what?

How about exceptions? Do they help?

• Temporary copy is unlikely applicable.
• Research exception is applicable on condition that:
  • Research Purpose.
  • Citation of Sources (Impossible).

The introduction of a new exception under Directive 2019/790 Article 3 - Text and Data Mining for the purposes of scientific research

• Member States shall provide for an exception to the rights provided for in Article 6(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions made by research organizations and cultural heritage institutions in order to carry out, for the purposes of scientific research, text and data mining of works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access.

Beneficiaries of the TDM Exception

• Cultural Institutions
• "Research Organizations":
  • University, including its libraries.
  • A research institute or any other entity, the primary goal of which is to conduct scientific research or to carry out educational activities involving also the conduct of scientific research:
    • On a not-for-profit basis or by reinvesting all the profits in its scientific research.
    • Pursuant to a public interest mission recognized by a Member State; in such a way that the access to the results generated by such scientific research cannot be enjoyed on a preferential basis by an undertaking that exercises a decisive influence upon such organization.

On condition that

• They are lawful users.
• They use it for scientific research. Now a question: What sort of TDM is cut off from this exception?

The debate on TDM Exception

Wrapping Up

• TDM is the research method of the future.
• TDM contributes to innovation and dissemination of knowledge.
• TDM contributes to the DDE.

  However as to now:

• TDM is infringing copyright unless it falls within the exception introduced by the Copyright in the DSM directive:
  • Which is narrow and unclear.
  • Where the category of beneficiaries is not well-defined.
  • The commercial purpose is excluded although not explicitly.