The European Copyright Society (ECS) was founded in January 2012 by several European scholars and academics with the aim of creating a platform for critical and independent scholarly thinking on European Copyright law. Its members are scholars and academics from various countries of Europe, seeking to articulate and promote their views of the overall public interest on all topics in the field of authors rights, neighbouring rights and related matters. See more information on the ECS and its members here. 

For its 2023 conference in Leuven the ECS aims to explore 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 conference aims at discussing those issues.

All further information on the event might be consulted via the conference’s official website.