The Exception for Text and Data Mining (TDM) in the Proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market - Technical Aspects

Briefing 15-02-2018

In an increasingly data-driven and information-rich socio-economic context, the potential of predictive text and data mining (TDM, sometimes also referred to as text and data analysis) lies in particular in facilitating the processing, recombining, and extraction of further knowledge from large amounts of data and text, thus allowing the identification of patterns and associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information. To place things in context, according to an IBM marketing study, 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created, and it is expected that such growth rate will continue at an even faster pace in the future. In this sense, the analogy made with the physical universe appears apt: it is expected that by 2020 the digital universe – which consists of data created and copied annually and is doubling in size every two years – will contain nearly as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe.