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Authors:  Christian Handke, Lucie Guibault and Joan-Josep Vallbé

Abstract: This empirical paper discusses how copyright affects data mining (DM) by academic researchers. With the diffusion of digital information technology, DM is widely expected to increase the productivity of all kinds of research activities. Based on bibliometric data, we demonstrate that the share of DM-related research articles in all published academic papers has increased substantially over the last two decades. We develop an ordinal categorization of countries according to essential aspects of the copyright system that affect the costs and benefits of DM research. We show that countries in which data mining for academic research requires the express consent of rights holders, data mining makes up a significantly lower share of total research output. To our knowledge, this is the first time that an empirical study bears out a significant negative association between copyright protection and innovation. We also show that in countries where DM requires express consent by rights holders, stronger rule-of-law is associated with less DM research.

Citation: Handke, Christian and Guibault, Lucie and Vallbé, Joan-Josep, Is Europe Falling Behind in Data Mining? Copyright’s Impact on Data Mining in Academic Research (May 20, 2015).

Full text at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2608513 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2608513