Earlier this week LIBER released a response to the STM Association’s statement about text and data mining (TDM). The STM Association asserts that legal certainty already exists for TDM via publishers’ licences, and that creating copyright exceptions for text and data mining activities would undermine the investment incentives for ensuring that high-quality content is available.
LIBER refutes these claims. First, they say that publishers’ licenses for TDM are not straightforward or easy to understand.
Licences could never be described as simple; they are highly complex and can take months or even years to complete. They often refer to laws in other jurisdictions and in most European countries they can override the flexibilities that exceptions are intended to provide. Many licences explicitly forbid TDM associated activities such as crawling of content and the depositing of data in institutional repositories.
Second, LIBER argues that forcing researchers to acquire licenses to engage in text and data mining will divert investment money away from conducting important research, and instead will be used to pay for license compliance and monitoring activities. Instead, they say that a copyright exception for TDM would actually promote investment, not inhibit it.
An exception for TDM can act as an investment incentive. By implementing the exception for TMD proposed by the Hargreaves review of UK copyright frameworks, the UK government has made a clear statement that legal clarity around activities such as TDM will spur innovation and growth. In the wake of the implementation of this exception tools to support TDM and improve the quality of content have already begun to emerge. Researchers in the UK have developed their own openly available tools for conversion of text files into structured standardised formats.
COMMUNIA strongly supports the notion that “the right to read is the right to mine.” We encouraged the development of clear rules for researchers who must be able to read and analyse all information that is available to them through text and data mining. We are an original signatory to the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age. And we criticized the development of bespoke licenses, which would create confusion and claim to grant permission to do many things that re-users do not need permission to do.
