From infringement to exception: why the rules on data mining in Europe need to change | CREATe

"As societies gather increasing amounts of data, interest is growing in technology that allows people to explore and analyse it. The process used, known as data mining, offers many potential benefits. In the pharmaceutical field, for example, it can help medical researchers to discover correlations between illnesses and treatments, as well as improve diagnostics, aid understanding of multifactorial diseases, and repurpose existing drugs. Law enforcement agencies can use data mining to spot patterns in the times and dates that crimes are committed, helping them to allocate resources more effectively and prevent crimes from being committed in first place.

But questions remain about the legal framework that governs the use of data mining. In particular, do UK and EU copyright rules and the sui generis database right law impede the use of DM?"