Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition to acquire a leading role in the data economy. At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use. In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong. Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of EU creative and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence training systems, will most probably be lost. The problem has a worldwide dimension. While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.

The published article: https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-13-1-2022/5515

Preprint version

The earlier preprint version on SSRN our for direct download here on Data & Lyrics. Senftleben, Martin and Margoni, Thomas and Antal, Daniel and Bodó, Balázs and Gompel, Stef van and Handke, Christian and Kretschmer, Martin and Poort, Joost and Quintais, João and Schwemer, Sebastian Felix, Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market - The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies and the Opportunity Arising from Article 17 of the CDSM Directive (February 12, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3785272 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3785272

Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 11:00:00 +0000

PLOS One is the fourth most influential multidisciplinary journal after Nature, and Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (based on H index.) On December 3, 2020 it published a paper co-authored by Dr. Balazs Bodo, associate professor at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), Daniel Antal (Reprex, Demo Music Observatory), a data scientist interested in reproducible research, as an independent researcher, and Zoltan Puha, a Data Science PhD at Tilburg University, JADS. PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit Open Access publisher, empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

The article utilizes the our reproducible datasets created with our regions package, and builds on many years of expertise in empirical research on the field of music and audiovisual piracy, home copying and private copying compensation (see for example Private Copying in Croatia.) Our aim is to provide reliable, high quality indicators for the creative industries not only on national, but provincial, state, regional and metropolitan area level, too, because these levels are often more relevant for creators, performers and policy-makers.

The topic of the paper is Library Genesis (LG), the biggest piratical scholarly library on the internet, which provides copyright infringing access to more than 2.5 million scientific monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks. The paper uses advanced statistical methods to explain why researchers around the globe use copyright infringing knowledge resources. The analysis is based on a huge usage dataset from LG, as well as data from the World Bank, Eurostat, and Eurobarometer, to identify the role of macroeconomic factors, such as R&D and higher education spending, GDP, researcher density in scholarly copyright infringing activities.

We created a global and a far more detailed European model for pirate book downloads.

The main finding of the paper is that open access, even if it is radical, is not a panacea. The hypothesis of the research was that researchers in low-income regions use piratical open knowledge resources relatively more to compensate for the limitations of their legal access infrastructures. The authors found evidence to the contrary. Researchers in high income countries and European regions with access to high quality knowledge infrastructures, and high levels of funding use radical open access resources more intensively than researchers in lower income countries and regions, with less resourceful libraries. This means that while open knowledge is an important resource to close the knowledge gap between centrum and periphery, equality in access does not translate into equality in use. Structural knowledge inequalities are both present and are being reproduced in the context of open access resources.

The paper is unique not just because of the data it is based on. It also sets new standards in interdisciplinary legal research by publishing the paper, the data and the software code in the same time in open access repositories, following reproducible research best practices — the practices that we want to promote in our Digital Music Observatory and further data observatories to serve business, evidence-based policy and scientific research.

Our research was funded from the Horizon Europe 2020 Research grant #710722 “OPENing UP new methods, indicators and tools for peer review, dissemination of research results, and impact measurement”.

Balazs Bodó | Reprex

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Preprint version

Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia