Text and Data Mining : Articles 3 and 4 of the Directive 2019/790/EU

Our society is in the midst of an explosion of data: ‘there was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing’. In 2014, there were 2.4 billion internet users. That number grew to 3.8 billion in 2017 and new data is created by the quintillions of bytes every day. Together with mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) contributes to this huge data production. In the big data era, orientating within this magma of online data has become an extremely complex but crucial task, also leading to complex issues in terms of regulation of this new environment. The European Union seems at first to have acknowledged the potential of monitoring data, putting in place measures to unlock TDM potentialities. On 14 September 2016, the European Commission published a Proposal for a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, which was approved into Directive 2019/790/EU on 17 April 2019 (“DSM Directive”). Inter alia, this copyright reform would like to improve access to protected works across borders within the Digital Single Market (DSM) to boost research and innovation. To this end, the DSM Directive includes a set of new mandatory exceptions and limitations. In particular, the reform introduces two specific limitations for TDM. In this chapter, the introduction of mandatory TDM limitations in European law will be assessed against the international and European framework of copyright exceptions and limitations by considering the rationales for such an exception and the positive and negative impacts of the reform. Giving the importance of TDM activities for the economic development in the EU and its innovative environment, the question arises if the reform lives up to the expectations. Although, following our previous suggestions, the scope of the limitation has been broadened, the final text of the reform still limits the full exploitation of the potential of data for research and innovation, for start-ups as well as more generally for the broader access to works and the information they contain