Twenty eight organisations, including LIBER, have signed a letter calling for an improved Text and Data Mining Exception which will support research and innovation in Europe.
The letter was sent to the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI). The signatories include universities, technology companies, startups and scaleups, libraries, scientific and research funding and performing organisations, open access publishers, investigative and data journalists and nonprofits.
The growing use of big data and artificial intelligence tools in research and innovation now result from the seamless collaboration between public and private organisations. According to LIBER, this successful ecosystem will be penalised if the European Parliament's work on TDM in the Copyright Directive continues in its current direction.
The letter makes the point that Text and Data Mining plays a key role in Artificial Intelligence. Any comprehensive strategy to make Europe globally competitive in the race to develop and implement AI-powered solutions must therefore include robust support for TDM in both the public and private research industries, and not be reserved for very limited non-commercial public interest research projects.
It also notes that limiting the ability of private companies to carry out TDM in Europe will inevitably lead to the most promising European startups and companies relocating to the US or Japan, where the legal frameworks will allow them to have access to broader datasets, and where they will be able to build algorithms of better quality.
Specifically, the signatories of the letter are asking the JURI Committee to broaden the scope of Article 3.1 to include any person (natural or legal) that has lawful access to content, provided that reproduction or extraction is used for the sole purpose of text and data mining; support the European Commission's proposal on article 3.2 to ensure that contractual terms restricting the use of the exception are unenforceable; clarify in Article 3.3 that technical measures cannot be used to unreasonably restrict the exception's beneficiaries to conduct TDM; and add a paragraph in Article 3 to allow datasets created for the purpose of TDM to be stored on secured servers for future verification.
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