Answer to WIPO’s draft issues paper on intellectual property policy and artificial intelligence

The European Alliance for Research Excellence (EARE) is a coalition of companies and research organisations formed in 2017 that are committed to the future of innovation and R&D in Europe. The coalition is supported by BSA | The Software Alliance, Allied for Startups, Research Libraries UK, SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries) and UCL Library (University College  London), and has been advocating for copyright rules in Europe that enable a fair and effective use of Text and Data Mining (TDM), to ensure Europe’s competitiveness and future prosperity.

Since 2017, we have been supporting a broad, easy-to-understand TDM exception in Europe. TDM generates actionable intelligence from data sets that were once too large and too volatile to analyse, and is driving revolutionary advances in data analytics, machine learning, and artificial
intelligence that are helping address some of society’s most pressing challenges.

We warmly welcome the opportunity to provide comments on WIPO’s draft issues paper on intellectual property policy and artificial intelligence (WIPO/IP/AI/2/GE/20/1). We believe that the key issues related to TDM are already correctly identified in the draft issues paper, namely through points b) Copyright/Issue 7) Infringement and Exceptions and c) Data 10) Further Rights in Relation to Data.

However, EARE members wish to highlight issues and questions that are highly relevant for the TDM discussion, while at the same time suggesting additional questions to be considered to ensure the appropriate IP framework is put in place to take full advantage of the opportunities provided by the data economy and train artificial intelligence applications.