Opere dell’ingegno come dati: il text and data mining nella direttiva 2019/790

The essay analyzes the rules on text and data mining of the Directive 790/2019. The essay takes as a starting point that text and data mining activities use copyrighted works merely as data, i.e. without interfering with their actual value as creative expressions of ideas. This was the key issue in the Authors’ Guild v. Google and Authors’ Guild v. Hathi Trust litigations in the United States. At the outcome, the US Courts stated that mass digitization of literary works for data mining is a transformative use, covered by the fair use doctrine, notwithstanding the eventual commercial aims of the defendant. On the contrary, the 2019/790 directive provides for different regulations of the text and data mining activities carried out by research organizations and cultural heritage institutions for purposes of scientific research, on the one hand (art. 3) and of similar activities aimed at different tasks, including commercial ones. Such different treatment of commercial and non-commercial text and data mining activities raises various interpretative issues, and does not seem to match with the actual nature of algorithmic research. Finally, the essay compares the legal techniques for the protection of personal data and of copyrighted works vis-à-vis “big data”