Legal reform to enhance global text and data mining research: Outdated copyright laws around the world hinder research

Researchers engaged in text and data mining (TDM) research collect vast amounts of digitized material and use software to analyze and extract information from it. TDM is a crucial first step to many machine learning, digital humanities, and social science applications, addressing some of the world’s greatest scientific and societal challenges, from predicting and tracking COVID-19 to battling hate speech and disinformation (1–3). Although applications of TDM often occur across borders, with researchers, subjects, and materials in more than one country, a patchwork of copyright laws across jurisdictions limits where and how TDM research can occur. With the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, and legislatures around the world, deliberating the harmonization of copyright exceptions for various research uses, we discuss policy measures that can ensure that TDM research is unambiguously authorized under copyright law. Most text, images, and other materials that TDM researchers use are subject to copyright law. Copyright law gives the owner of a protected work the legal right to prohibit reproduction, distribution, modification, and other forms of exploitation of that work without the owner’s permission. These rights apply even if the material is readily accessible—for example, published on the internet or available in a library.