infoJustice

Sergey Filippov and Paul Hofheinz
Excerpt from Text and Data Mining for Research and Innovation 
Lisbon Council (CC-BY-NC-SA), Click here for the full paper

On 09 December 2015, the European Commission proposed a mandatory exception for research in EU copyright legislation for “public interest research organisations to carry out text and data mining of content they have lawful access to, with full legal certainty, for scientific research purposes.”

The initiative was welcomed by many if not most in the research community, though some expressed concern about the language used, not least the term “public interest research organisation,” which is disputable and therefore likely to be a target for legal challenge. The second part of the text – “for scientific research purposes” – is also open to misinterpretation, both in the scope and meaning of the word “science” (does that include machine-analysis of images for market research purposes?) and even the term “research” which might be argued to exclude experimental study without any pre-defined objective, or a formulated hypothesis. A proposed exception for “non-commercial” research is problematic, too, given ever closer partnerships and collaborations between publicly funded research institutions and companies – an objective aggressively pursued by public policy in recent years.

Like the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER), OpenForum Europe and many others, we believe that the only workable and justifiable solution is the least ambiguous one: a harmonised, mandatory exception at the EU level covering all text-and-data-mining activities, for any purpose, commercial and non-commercial, and an exception that cannot be overriden by a contract and is applicable to all rights holders – corporate, individual, public and private. Like these advocates, we believe that greater adoption of text and data mining is an important prerequisite for informing and energising the European economy in the digital era. Policy should support the embrace of this technique rather than seeking to resist it.