I was honored by a fact that I could be present at a seminar devoted to the future of data mining and text mining in the European Union. The seminar was a formal one, but otherwise - after few formal speeches it turned into a nice discussion. It's name was quite a long one, but that's the way how practically every event related to EU is named: Pathways for Text and Data Mining – Balancing users’ and owners’ needs.
Most of the people present at the event were either the representatives of the Publishers or the European Comission. One could speculate, that such an event would be of the very same kind, as the Private Copying Levies that took place last week. But the difference between these two events when it comes to standpoints was more than surprising.
Most of the people present in the room were in favor of so-called "open access". They see that text mining and data mining are useful tools for many reasons. The one thing that are the publishers acutally afraid is a situation, when metadata will be treated by some of their colleagues as intellectual property and thus these will be unaccessible. To be honest, I do not remember a simple voice speaking in favor of this approach during the meeting. Almost everyone in the room however agreed how dangerous this might be.
The other issue was also a legal point of view which simply turned into a copyright-related discussion. Considering a fact that the Pirate point of view on this issue is quite certain, I did not feel myself in a need to enlighten everybody. The conclusion from the stakeholders seemed for me to be quite Pirate-friendly. A question however remains; how much the open access will be actually "opened" and what the licencing policies that were suggested by several of the participants will look like.
In this part of the discussion I felt it is neccessary to remind a fact that was already noted by Christian Engström, another Swedish MEP. A fact, that the more complicated licencing policy we create, the more the rules and regulations of this policy will be violated. It was interesting to hear a words of agreement from some of the present ones.
But it's funny. Did anyone actually bring up actual copyright reform? When the research libraries and universities left Licenses for Europe, a program set up by the Commission this spring, they did so with explicit mentioning of the fact that the Commission and publishers seemed unwilling to discuss a reform of the actual legislation.
So if I understood this problem the right way, it is that the Commission workgroup was unable to explore any other option forward than more licensing and different licensing deals, whereas in fact what everyone was interested in was a reform of the law itself. Was that reflected in the meeting or was it a publisher dominated meeting?
Well, for all the time I've been asking myself that "where is the detail where the devil is hiding". It might be the licencing topic in general. There was pretty little about this said.
Yes, many of the people from various organizations were interested in an idea for a legal reform related to the text and data mining. But pretty much no proposal was shown at the table. Some of the people (ie. Koperdag) agreed that the current state when "right to read is right to mine" is ok and according to current legal point of view is datamining possible without any limitations.
From what I can say the meeting was not dominated by publishers. More or less it seemed to be as a very peaceful exchange of very similar views of the commission as well as of the publishers. It seemed to me that something or someone did change the publishers' point of view and they are now very close to the commission's point of view.
It was definitely not the commission who spoke about some licensing proposal, but they pointed out that a legislative backbone must be made. Then the discussion turned into a debate what is and what is not commercial and non-commerical datamining (which from my own experience can be a little tricky to define).
Neither the publishers nor the European Commission have so far been very keen on copyright reform, although the time is getting nigher when such a reform will be impossible to hold off.
It is highly interesting if DG Markt representatives and publishers have talked over lunch about the potential of a reform of the Infosoc directive or decisive copyright legislation.
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