Scientists Realizing That EU Ruling On Copyright & Links Just Made Science Much More Difficult

Last week, we wrote about a terrible copyright ruling from the Court of Justice of the EU, which basically says that any for-profit entity that links to infringing material can be held liable for direct infringement, as the "for-profit" nature of the work is seen as evidence that they knew or should have known the work was infringing. We discussed the problems with this standard in our post, and there's been a lot of commentary on what this will mean for Europe -- with a variety of viewpoints being expressed. One really interesting set of concerns comes from Egon Willighagen, from Maastricht University, noting what a total and complete mess this is going to be for scientists, who rarely consider the copyright status of various data as databases they rely on are built up:

Now, realize that in many European Commission funded projects, with multiple partners, sharing IP is non-trivial, ownership even less (just think about why traditional publishers require you to reassign copyright to them! BTW, never do that!), etc, etc. A lot of funding actually goes to small and medium sized companies, who are really not waiting for more complex law, nor more administrative work.

A second realization is that few scientists understand or want to understand copyright law. The result is hundreds of scholarly databases which do not define who owns the data, nor under what conditions you are allowed to reuse it, or share, or reshare, or modify. Yet scientists do. So, not only do these database often not specify the copyright/license/waiver (CLW) information, the certainly don't really tell you how they populated their database. E.g. how much they copied from other websites, under the assumption that knowledge is free. Sadly, database content is not. Often you don't even need wonder about it, as it is evident or even proudly said they used data from another database. Did they ask permission for that? Can you easily look that up? Because you are now only allowed to link to that database until you figured out if they data, because of the above quoted argument. And believe me, that is not cheap.

Combine that, and you have this recipe for disaster.

A recipe for disaster indeed.

This is, of course, not the first time we've noted the problems of intellectual property in the science world. From various journals locking up research to the rise of patents scaring off researchers from sharing data, intellectual property keeps getting in the way of science, rather than supporting it. And that's extremely unfortunate. I mean, after all, in the US specifically, the Constitution specifically says that copyrights and patents are supposed to be about "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts."

Over and over again, though, we see that the law has been twisted and distorted and extended and expanded in such a way that is designed to protect a very narrow set of interests, at the expense of many others, including the public who would benefit from greater sharing and collaboration and open flow of data among scientific researchers. Having the CJEU make things worse in Europe isn't going to help Europe compete -- and, unfortunately, it does not look like those in Europe looking to update its copyright laws understand any of this yet.

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