The text and data mining exceptions in the UK, France and the EU @ JUSPI Paris

At the start of the month, I was honoured to be invited in Paris to participate in the inaugural colloquium of a new group of IP scholars, ‘Les Jeunes Universitaires Spécialisés en Propriété Intellectuelle’ (JUSPI), literally the Young Academics Specialised in Intellectual Property, whose name, it transpired during the colloquium, was chosen in part to allow for a pun in the acronym, namely, the juxtaposition of Jus, the Latin word for law and P.I., for IP in French.  For more information on JUSPI you can check their website and their twitter feed @Les_Juspi .

The conference was hosted in the Paris Descartes Law School, home of Dr Caroline Le Goffic, one of the founding members of JUSPI, and was sponsored by two law firms, Fidal and Nexo.

This first conference was a great success as a rich program, tackling all the major types of IP rights, attracted a very large audience (see the report on the website of JUSPI).

As for my talk, it was on the text data mining exception in copyright law. I presented the legislative history of the data mining exceptions in the United Kingdom and France, comparing the two exceptions in the context of the current discussions at EU level over the proposed directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market[1] and its article 3 on text and data mining.

My paper as well as the other proceedings of the colloquium will soon be published in ‘La revue Propriétés Intellectuelles’. I will keep you posted with the references for the articles as soon as they have all been published.

It was great to be part of this very successful first conference and I sure hope we will all have the opportunity to meet again and further expand the reach of the conference in terms of participants, topics and locations.

[1] European Commission, ‘Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Copyright in the Digital Single Market – COM(2016) 593 Final’ (14 September 2016) <http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593>.