[open-science] UK Government to introduce copyright exceptions for data and text mining

Fri Aug 12 08:03:42 UTC 2011

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/data_mining_given_the_go_ahead.html

Full report here:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/g/11-1199-government-response-to-hargreaves-review
 [pdf]

"The Government sees the areas where copyright restricts activity to no
direct commercial benefit as doubly wasteful: neither new opportunities nor
incentive to invest in copyright works result from them. Nor does the
Government regard it as appropriate for certain activities of public benefit
such as medical research obtained through text mining to be in effect
subject to veto by the owners of copyrights in the reports of such research,
where access to the reports was obtained lawfully. We recognise that some
publishers view licensing of text mining as a legitimate commercial
opportunity; however we are not persuaded that restricting this
transformative use of copyright material is necessary or in the UK’s overall
economic interest."

Not being a lawyer, I have no idea how far this will impact what publishers
are allowed to ban in their license agreements with institutions, which as
we've discussed on the list before is where the mining restrictions are
often found (often banning use of all automated indexing/searching/mining
tools and citing server load issues) and involve contract rather than
copyright law.

Jenny
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