Day March 2, 2020

Overview of 2020 Special 301 Hearing

Last week, the Interagency Trade Policy Staff Committee chaired by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) held its hearing for the 2020 Special 301 Review... All of the documents associated with the investigation, including the request for comments, submissions from industries and countries, etc. and hearing statements are available at https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USTR-2019-0023. A transcript of the hearing will be posted on the docket within the two weeks. Below are some notes on the hearing.

Copyright and the Progress of Science: Why Text and Data Mining Is Lawful

Abstract: This Article argues that U.S. copyright law provides a competitive advantage in the global race for innovation policy because it permits researchers to conduct computational analysis — text and data mining — on any materials to which they have access. Amendments to copyright law in Japan, and the European Union’s recent addition of limitations on copyright to legalize some TDM research, implicitly acknowledge the competitive benefits provided by the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law.

Germany sets bad example with the proposed implementation of the new education exception

[Teresa Nobre] A few weeks ago, the German government shared its proposal for the implementation of some of the provisions of the new Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, including the new EU education exception (Article 5 in the final version of the Directive). Similarly to what we did with the Dutch proposal, we will provide here an overview of the German proposal to implement locally the new exception. This is part of our effort to track how countries across Europe implement this mandatory exception to copyright for educational purposes.