Data that is mined with the help of machine learning techniques has been a rapid area of technological advancement – with good and bad consequences for everyone. And EU copyright law is currently caught in the crossfire.
Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s recent data scandal, which involved the profiling of users from their online behaviour facilitated by social networks, brought important issues to the surface about web privacy, only after it was reported that millions of people had their data harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.
But the same data mining technique also offers great societal benefit in fields such as traffic prediction, natural language processing and the identification of potential cures for diseases.
Many people think that regulating the use of data is a matter of data protection or privacy laws. However, where the raw material subjected to analysis is not “personal data” but material protected under copyright law, such as texts or certain structured databases, another set of legal norms come into play. This has far reaching and little understood consequences.

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