UK Government Paves Way for Data-Mining
Blog report on interesting UK government policy report.
From the post:
The key recommendation is that the Government should press at EU level for the introduction of an exception to current copyright law, allowing “non-consumptive” use of a work (ie a use that doesn’t directly trade on the underlying creative and expressive purpose of the work). In the process of text-mining, copying is only carried out as part of the analysis process – it is a substitute for a human reading the work, and therefore does not compete with the normal exploitation of the work itself – in fact, as the paper says, these processes actually facilitate a work’s exploitation (ie by allowing search, or content recommendation). (emphasis in original)
If you think of topic maps as a value-add on top of information stores, allowing “non-consumptive” access would be a real boon for topic maps.
You could create a topic map into copyrighted material and the user of your topic map could access that material only if say they were a subscriber to that content.
As Steve Newcomb has argued on many occasions, topic maps can become economic artifacts in their own right.