Copyright law and text and data mining

Abstract

Digital environment poses new challenges to the traditional concept of copyright protection. Digital copies of works, new forms of exploitation of copyrighted goods, the impossibility of adequate enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet and, in this regard, the reexamination of the role of intermediaries, are just some of the issues that have occupied the scientific and professional public. New circumstances necessarily impose changes in the copyright protection regime, including the introduction of new rights but also new exceptions and limitations on copyright. The EU Directive (2019/790) on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market introduced exceptions on text and data mining. Given the huge amount of data in the digital environment, the analytical technique is commonly used for text research, data collection and processing. This technique is aimed at finding correlations and patterns, and extracting information from large amounts of data by using automated methods. Text and data mining may be performed in a variety of fields and for different purposes: scientific research, research in journalism, medicine, business, or for market research purposes. Such text and data may be protected by copyright, which gives rise to the question of possible copyright infringement. The new Directive introduced two mandatory exceptions on copyright and related rights for the purpose of text and data mining, one of which is explicitly provided for scientific research purposes. These exceptions are important for the freedom of scientific research in the digital environment but also for some issues related to the development of Artificial Intelligence.

Keywords

• copyright law
• text and data mining
• directive 2019/790
• copyright exceptions and limitations
• scientific research