Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong; The Conversation, May 24, 2018

Martin Kretschmer

Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Glasgow and Thomas Margoni

Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property and Internet Law, University of Glasgow,

The Conversation;  
Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong

"Data that is mined with the help of machine learning techniques has been a rapid area of technological advancement – with good and bad consequences for everyone. And EU copyright law is currently caught in the crossfire.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s recent data scandal, which involved the profiling of users from their online behaviour facilitated by social networks, brought important issues to the surface about web privacy, only after it was reported that millions of people had their data harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.

But the same data mining technique also offers great societal benefit in fields such as traffic prediction, natural language processing and the identification of potential cures for diseases.

Many people think that regulating the use of data is a matter of data protection or privacy laws. However, where the raw material subjected to analysis is not “personal data” but material protected under copyright law, such as texts or certain structured databases, another set of legal norms come into play. This has far reaching and little understood consequences."

WTF is GDPR?; TechCrunch, January 20, 2018

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch; WTF is GDPR?

"The EC’s theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do.

The General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR) was agreed after more than three years of negotiations between the EU’s various institutions.

It’s set to apply across the 28-Member State bloc as of May 25, 2018. That means EU countries are busy transposing it into national law via their own legislative updates (such as the UK’s new Data Protection Bill — yes, despite the fact the country is currently in the process of (br)exiting the EU, the government has nonetheless committed to implementing the regulation because it needs to keep EU-UK data flowing freely in the post-brexit future. Which gives an early indication of the pulling power of GDPR.

Meanwhile businesses operating in the EU are being bombarded with ads from a freshly energized cottage industry of ‘privacy consultants’ offering to help them get ready for the new regs — in exchange for a service fee. It’s definitely a good time to be a law firm specializing in data protection."

‘All of our federal data assets are currently at risk’ — here’s how people are trying to protect them; FedScoop, February 19, 2017

Samantha Ehlinger, FedScoop; 

‘All of our federal data assets are currently at risk’ — here’s how people are trying to protect them

"A group of coders, librarians, scientists, storytellers and others passionate about data came together at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., this weekend to preserve federal data that some worry could disappear under different Trump administration priorities. The goal of the DataRescueDC event: store federal climate and environmental data that is “vulnerable under an administration that denies the fact of ongoing climate change.”

But while fear of losing federal scientific data during the Trump administration has galvanized work across the country to preserve reputable copies of key data, during Saturday’s events experts involved in the project said that it also highlights the need for creating an official infrastructure for safeguarding federal data.

“We talk a lot in this country about our failing infrastructure, and it’s really obvious when drinking water supplies are dangerous to the people who drink them. And it’s really obvious when a bridge collapses over the Mississippi river. But what was not really obvious, I think, until this juncture that we are now at is how incredible vulnerable our infrastructure for federal data is. Like, there isn’t one really. It’s totally just absent in many — in very powerful ways,” said Bethany Wiggin, founding director of the University of Pennsylvania Program in Environmental Humanities, which is facilitating Data Refuge."