Europe Struggles With Licensing Text and Data Mining

"You could characterize Licences for Europe, the European Commission’s Working Group 4 on text and data mining (WG4), either as a major meeting of the minds or as wishful thinking that scientists, librarians, publishers, and the entertainment industry could all just get along. Apparently, the wishful thinking characterization won the day with those wishes not granted as representatives of the library, research, and technology communities formally withdrew from the process just prior to the fourth scheduled meeting on May 29, 2013. The organizations signing the withdrawal letter are: [1] The Association of European Research Libraries [2] The Coalition for a Digital Economy [3] The European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations [4] The Open Knowledge Foundation [5] The COMMUNIA Thematic Network [6] Ubiquity Press Ltd. [7] The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue [8] The National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester [9] European Network for Copyright in Support of Education and Science [10] Jisc ... The disillusionment with WG4 set in early for library and research organizations. At the first meeting on Feb. 4, 2013, the organizations noticed that membership was skewed toward the publishing and entertainment sectors. The group was also worried that the agenda concentrated too much on adding licensing requirements for text and data mining rather than looking at implementation of exceptions for researchers.  The position of the publishing and entertainment sectors was that TDM constitutes a threat to their revenue bases and puts an enormous strain on their servers. Their solution, which many thought was a 'done deal' before WG4 even held its first meeting, was to require a second license for TDM, one that would be added onto existing licenses for access to publications.  An open letter to commissioners Michel Barnier, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Neelie Kroes, and Androulla Vassiliou (dated Feb. 26, 2013), states, 'It appears the research and technology communities have been presented not with a stakeholder dialogue, but a process with an already predetermined outcome—namely that additional licensing is the only solution to the problems being faced by those wishing to undertake TDM of content to which they already have lawful access.' Those signing this letter represent more than 60 organizations.  The situation worsened. It was only after the second meeting (on March 8, 2013) that a response from the commissioners to the February letter was forthcoming. Their letter, dated April 15, 2013, was a masterpiece of bureaucratizing, saying, '[Y]ou are of course free to point to all the issues and any limitations of current licensing models and indicate your preferred options.' It ends by reminding the recipients that the conclusions of WG4 are 'only of an information nature and do not bind any of the participants.'  Far from being mollified, the members of the library and research community saw the commissioners’ response as failing to address their concerns. TDM, in their opinion, is crucial to the next steps in research. Researchers’ ability to use computer programs to extract pertinent data from large numbers of scientific papers creates knowledge previously hidden. In the current era of Big Data, the opportunities to uncover groundbreaking information that could have profound implications in medicine, science, and technology are enormous. However, the licensing agreements that their institutions have signed with the publishers makes TDM either legally prohibited or financially untenable—or both.  The withdrawal letter, dated May 22, 2013, acknowledges the April 15th communication from the commissioners, but it strongly emphasizes the failure of WG4 to consider any path forward other than licensing. It also notes the 'urgent need' to lower legal barriers to become more competitive with the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, and it stresses the growing importance of open access (OA) content in the scientific community. The letter explicitly states the worry that 'our participation in a discussion that focuses primarily on proprietary licenses could be used to imply that our sectors accept the notion of double licensing as a solution. It is not.'  The withdrawal letter further states: 'We maintain that a vibrant internet and a healthy scholarly publishing community need not be at odds with a modern copyright framework that also allows for the barrier-free extraction of facts and data.' The frustration of the librar