ANALYSIS
PROFESSIONAL PUBLISHERS CONCERNED ABOUT DATA EXCEPTION IN UK’S IP PLANS
This summer the UK government accepted the recommendations of an independent review into copyright, which included an exception for data and text mining. Joe Hames of the Professional Publishers Association argues that such an exception could be damaging for many publishers
in the digital world. Britain’s £20 billion publishing industry is an important part of the government’s growth agenda, and so in order to give publishers a more suitable legal framework in which to operate better commercially in the 21st century, a timely review was commissioned in October 2010 by the UK prime minister, David Cameron. As reported earlier in the year, the intellectual property reforms investigation, led by Ian Hargreaves, published its official recommendations in May 2011. While the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) and the publishing industry as a whole welcomes the majority of the recommendations in the Hargreaves Review, there is one
A
lmost all publishers, regardless of the sector they operate in, will be aware that legal experts consider the UK’s copyright laws to be well behind what is needed
recommendation that is a matter of concern for many PPA members and, potentially, Research Information readers. While Hargreaves makes it clear in his recommendations that policy decisions should be based on commercial evidence, the government appears to have disregarded this when addressing the scope of copyright exceptions for the act of text or data mining in regards to non-commercial research. The Hargreaves report states: ‘We recognise
that some publishers view the licensing of text mining as a legitimate commercial opportunity’ but then goes on to say (without reference to any evidence to support the claim) ‘we are not persuaded that restricting this transformative use of copyright material is necessary or in the UK’s overall economic interest’. Many PPA members have built business
models around granting research-focussed permission requests to mine data. It is a new
area of business for publishers and important to future growth. Those who seek licences often do so with a view to their own profit. If data mining were suddenly excluded from copyright as recommended in the Hargreaves review, it would have very severe consequences on a publisher’s ability to generate revenue from its datasets. The PPA is currently consulting with the
UK Government on the Hargreaves Review, with a particular regard to data mining copyright.
‘Many PPA members have built business
models around granting research-focussed
permission requests to mine data’
METADATA PROJECT ATTRACTS FUNDING
A project to help digital repositories control and make money from their digital assets has attracted funding from the UK government
E
arlier this year Soutron and partners picked up a share of £3 million of UK government funding to help develop a way for organisations to control and manage digital assets after they have
‘left’ the repository in which they are usually stored. The project, known as Metadata
Encapsulation for Digital Information and Assets (MEDIA), uses a combination of cloud computing services and encapsulation technologies and is being carried out in partnership with the Chartered Management
14 Research Information DEC 2011/JAN 2012
Institute, Collections Trust and Knowledge Integration. ‘Stored digital material is growing at a rate
which would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. This funding will accelerate our delivery of a new breed of solutions which will allow professional institutes, museums and other protectors of digital material, to release the value of their assets. It will also facilitate unprecedented innovation in knowledge sharing to realise the full, and currently unknowable, potential of those assets,’ commented Graham Beastall, founder and MD of Soutron. According to Soutron, the project will
address two major problems that currently exist for many digital repositories and publishers of content. The first of these is the poor control of access to content and the digital assets that are referenced by metadata and easily downloaded and shared. The other problem is widespread unauthorised dissipation of
content following initial access. Metadata content flexibility and ease of publishing within an electronic charging system based on user usage and profiling is not currently available as an off the shelf application, says the company. Because of this, if an organisation wishes to publish content it will create its own website operations or place its content with a major online publisher. The concern with this approach is a lack of matching of the user with value or tracking potential secondary use. MEDIA intends to address this by helping
users to recover income and control additional revenue streams for content. It also promises a secure environment where content will not be dissipated. The MEDIA solution will be integrated
with Soutron’s existing appplications and will be offered as a service to integrate with other systems. The project is expected to be completed towards the end of 2012.
www.researchinformation.info
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