Copyright law




Situation in Europeedit

Under European copyright and database laws, the mining of in-copyright works (such as by web mining) without the permission of the copyright owner is not legal. Where a database is pure data in Europe, it may be that there is no copyright—but database rights may exist so data mining becomes subject to intellectual property owners' rights that are protected by the Database Directive. On the recommendation of the Hargreaves review, this led to the UK government to amend its copyright law in 2014 to allow content mining as a limitation and exception. The UK was the second country in the world to do so after Japan, which introduced an exception in 2009 for data mining. However, due to the restriction of the Information Society Directive (2001), the UK exception only allows content mining for non-commercial purposes. UK copyright law also does not allow this provision to be overridden by contractual terms and conditions.

The European Commission facilitated stakeholder discussion on text and data mining in 2013, under the title of Licences for Europe. The focus on the solution to this legal issue, such as licensing rather than limitations and exceptions, led to representatives of universities, researchers, libraries, civil society groups and open access publishers to leave the stakeholder dialogue in May 2013.

Situation in the United Statesedit

US copyright law, and in particular its provision for fair use, upholds the legality of content mining in America, and other fair use countries such as Israel, Taiwan and South Korea. As content mining is transformative, that is it does not supplant the original work, it is viewed as being lawful under fair use. For example, as part of the Google Book settlement the presiding judge on the case ruled that Google's digitization project of in-copyright books was lawful, in part because of the transformative uses that the digitization project displayed—one being text and data mining.

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