The last letter of the FAIR acronym stands for Reusability. Data and metadata should be made available with a clear and accessible usage license. But, what are the choices? How can researchers share data and allow reusability? Are all the licenses available for sharing content suitable for data? Data can be covered by different layers of copyright protection making the relationship between data and copyright particularly complex. Some research data can be considered as a work and therefore covered by full copyright while other data can be in the public domain due to their lack of originality. Moreover, a collection of data can be protected by special rights in Europe to acknowledge the investment in time and money in obtaining, presenting, arranging or verifying the data. The need of using a license when sharing data comes from the fact that, under current copyright laws, when rights exist, the absence of any legal notice must be understood as the default “all rights reserved” regime. Unless an exception applies, the authorisation of right holders is necessary for reuse. Right holders could use any text to state the reusability of data but it is advisable to use some of the existing licenses, and especially the ones that are suitable for data and databases. We hope that with this paper we can bring some clarity in relation to the rights involved when sharing research data.
Open Access' main goal is not the subversion of publishers' role as driving actors in an oligopolistic market characterized by reduced competition and higher prices. OA's main function is to be found somewhere else, namely in the ability to subvert the power to control science's governance and its future directions (Open Science), a power that is more often found within the academic institutions rather than outside. By decentralizing and opening-up not just the way in which scholarship is published but also the way in which it is assessed, OA removes the barriers that helped turn science into an intellectual oligopoly even before an economic one. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society. Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more "informed" and effective. This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how this impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.
Increasingly the digital content used in everyday life has little or no human intervention in its creation. Typically, when such content is delivered to consumers it comes with attached claims of copyright. However, depending on the jurisdiction, approaches to ownership of computer-generated works vary from legislated to uncertain. In this paper we look at the various approaches taken by the common law, and the legislative approach take in the United Kingdom.
Abstract:This article analyses some of the legal tools available to organisers of sporting events under EU law and the law of EU Member States. The focus is on remedies based on property rights and contracts, as well as on intellectual property , unfair competition rules and so called "special" forms of protection. As it is well known, in fact, following the ECJ ruling in Premier League v QC Leisure, sporting events as such do not qualify as works under EU copyright law. Nevertheless, the article shows that remedies based on both traditional and new forms of property, IP and cognate rights can still offer adequate protection to sports organisers. First, many sports events take place in dedicated venues on which sports organisers can claim exclusive use rights and thereupon develop conditional access agreements (i.e. "house right"). Second, the recording and broadcast of sporting events may give rise to a variety of intellectual property rights, especially in the field of copyright and related rights. Third, unfair competition rules, and in particular misappropriation doctrines, have been invoked to protect sporting activities from unauthorised copying. Fourth, special forms of protection have recently been devised at the national level in order to offer an additional layer of rights protecting sports organisers. The article argues that even in the absence of a dedicated EU harmonised right tailored to sports events, the current legal framework is well equipped to offer protection to the investments that the sport industry is making in this sector. The article also argues that national initiatives in the field have so far proven of little practical relevance and, as a matter of fact, have the potential to clash with the general EU legal framework. There is only one area that escapes this rule: a right to use sporting events data to organise betting activities, or in other words, a right to consent to bets. The article concludes that if such a right is to be recognised, it is not the field of intellectual property, nor even property in general, the most appropriate area of law at which to look.
This paper focuses on the two exceptions for text and data mining (TDM) introduced in the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). While both are mandatory for Member States, Art. 3 is also imperative and finds application in cases of text and data mining for the purpose of scientific research by research and cultural institutions; Art. 4, on the other hand, permits text and data mining by anyone but with rightholders able to ‘contract-out’ (Art. 4). We trace the context of using the lever of copyright law to enable emerging technologies such as AI and the support innovation. Within the EU copyright intervention, elements that may underpin a transparent legal framework for AI are identified, such as the possibility of retention of permanent copies for further verification. On the other hand, we identify several pitfalls, including an excessively broad definition of TDM which makes the entire field of data-driven AI development dependent on an exception. We analyse the implications of limiting the scope of the exceptions to the right of reproduction; we argue that the limitation of Art. 3 to certain beneficiaries remains problematic; and that the requirement of lawful access is difficult to operationalize. In conclusion, we argue that there should be no need for a TDM exception for the act of extracting informational value from protected works. The EU’s CDSM provisions paradoxically may favour the development of biased AI systems due to price and accessibility conditions for training data that offer the wrong incentives. To avoid licensing, it may be economically attractive for EU-based developers to train their algorithms on older, less accurate, biased data, or import AI models already trained abroad on unverifiable data.
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