Data mining to be exempt from UK copyright laws

Data mining, the process of analysing data for trends and patterns, will be made exempt from UK copyright laws. The change is part of the government's plans to modernize the UK's intellectual property laws, and is based on the recommendations made by Ian Hargreaves, Chair of Digital Economy at the University of Cardiff, in his May 2011 report Digital Opportunity: A review of intellectual property and growth.

For example, 87% of the material housed on the UK PubMed Central requires the copyright owner's permission for text and data mining, which researchers say takes too much time and is in many cases impractical. Researchers can text and data mine author manuscripts from journals on the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. Although still protected by copyright, such manuscripts are made available under a Creative Commons license, which is more flexible.

Hargreaves' recommendations could change all this. "The recommendations are immensely positive," says Ben White, head of intellectual property at the British Library. "We think it's immensely beneficial to the research sector that [the government] has accepted the Hargreaves recommendations."

The development could make the UK "an extremely attractive place to carry out research and it will speed up the innovation cycle," adds White.

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