EU copyright reform: time to walk the talk! - LERU : League of European Research Universities

"EU copyright reform: time to walk the talk! 09 December 2015 Today, 9 December 2015, the European Commission has issued a Communication on the modernisation of copyright which will set the tone and pace of the change to come. The Communication sets out how the Commission intends to achieve “the goal of a modern, more European copyright framework” through a set of proposals planned for 2016 and a long-term vision. With regard to Text and Data Mining (TDM) it is now time to walk the talk and to turn the irreversible but primarily implicit references, announcements and promises in the present Communication (and accompanying Q&A) into an explicit mandatory exception in the Spring legislative proposal. LERU, the League of European Research Universities, has long campaigned for an Exception for Text and Data Mining, which cannot be overridden by contract, which would be mandatory for all Member States, and which would allow anyone with legal access to content to perform content mining. Today’s Communication reflects many of these views. It notes that ‘The lack of a clear EU provision on TDM for scientific research purposes creates uncertainties in the research community. This harms the EU’s competitiveness and scientific leadership at a time when research and innovation (R&I) activities within the EU must increasingly take place through cross-border and cross-discipline collaboration and on a larger scale, in response to the major societal challenges that R&I addresses’. What does the Commission propose to do? Well, it implicitly rejects the position on licensing for TDM which the recent EPP Group position paper on copyright reform wrongly advocated. Instead, the Commission will consider a legislative proposal for Text and Data Mining in 2016 to allow public interest research organisations to carry out text and data mining of content to which they have lawful access, with full legal certainty, for scientific research purposes. This is a significant step forward...."