Some observations of the French TDM exception

As of October 7, 2016, the law on a Digital Republic (“République Numérique”) introduced an exception for text and data mining (TDM) in the French Intellectual Property Code. It comprises of two parts: a copyright exception and a sui generis database right exception. Both exempt reproductions made of works or databases to mine text and data from scientific literature (or associated with that), when there is lawful access to the source and absent any commercial purpose, although their respective wordings are slightly different. Moreover, both exceptions provide some safeguards and opportunities with regard to conservation and communication of any reproductions made in the TDM process after the TDM activities are carried out. In this blog post, I will shortly provide some of my observations of this exception.