For its 2023 conference in Leuven the ECS explored different aspects of the relationship between copyright and data, whether personal or non-personal. Data has become central: one speaks of the data society or data economy, and data access is also seen as an ingredient for a vibrant democracy. Thus, no wonder that data regulation has been at the core of recent EU legislative initiatives, including the Digital Services Act, Data Governance Act, draft Data Act, and draft AI Act. While copyright and the related rights, including the database right, aim at protecting, among others, compilations of data, the new laws aim primarily at facilitating the sharing and reuse of data. This might create new frictions; at least, new questions are raised. The May 25 conference aimed at discussing those issues.

THE PROGRAMME OF THE EVENT

08:30    Registration and Coffee

​​​09:00    Welcome by Marie-Christine Janssens, Chair ECS
09:15    Setting the scene: overview of data-related regulations – Alain Strowel 

Session 1: Copyright & the Data Act

Chair: Olé Andreas Rognstad
09:30    Data as a subject matter of EU legal acts – Alexander Peukert
09:45    Review of the database right: from national case law to chapter X of the draft Data Act – Estelle Derclaye
10:00    Can the rights of data holders and users be conceptualized as IP rights/exceptions? – Axel Metzger
10:15    Q & A

10:30    Coffee Break

Session 2: Data access & challenges for research

Chair: Eleni-Tatiani Synodinou
11:00    The need to ensure access to machine-generated data for research – Martin Senftleben
11:15    Promoting Open Science and research: the need to reconceptualize copyright as an access right – Christophe Geiger
11:30    Access for research: what to gain from the Open Data directive and Data Governance Act? – Mireille van Eechoud
11:45    Q & A

Interlude : Views from the European Commission: how to balance the new data sharing obligations with copyright, other IP rights and trade secrets

12:00    The exceptions for copyright and trade secrets to data sharing obligations – Caterina Sganga

12:15    Panel discussion with Andrea Katalin Tóth, legal and policy officer at the Data Policy and Innovation Unit of DG CNECT and Virginie                                       Fossoul, legal and policy and legal officer at the Copyright Unit (DG GROW – Unit C4 Intangible Economy)
               Moderator : Alain Strowel

13:00    Sandwich Lunch

Session 3 : Copyright & generative AI

Chair: Raquel Xalabarder
14:15    The use of training data by generative AI : a copyright perspective – Péter Mezei 
14:30    The challenge to attribute the AI-output to inputers – Thomas Dreier 
14:45    Q & A

Session 4 : Copyright & the Digital Services Act

Chair: Jonathan Griffiths
15:00    Liability alignment between the CDSMD and the DSA? – João Pedro Quintais
15:15    How to locate copyright within data and platform regulation – Martin Kretschmer
15:30   Q & A

15:45    Coffee Break

Session 5 : Reflecting on copyright and data

Chair: Reto Hilty
16:15    Works as data? The relation between copyright and data regulation – Valérie-Laure Bénabou
16:30   Data as commons – Séverine Dusollier
16:45   Q & A 

17:00    End of the conference