Data- and text-mining licensing

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I have been involved in a number of discussions concerning data 
and text mining recently and wonder if anyone has any experience 
with these topics that they would like to share.  The basic 
question is whether the license for an electronic resource in a 
form suitable to be read by humans extends as well to a license 
for machine-reading.

The area of data and text mining for scholarly materials is a new 
one, at least to me.  My understanding is that materials 
(research data, user data, published articles, books, etc.) can 
be gathered together in such a way as to enable robots to sift 
through them and identify patterns and themes. These new 
patterns--effectively robot-generated discoveries--may include 
things that are not present in any single document in the 
collection.  Thus, the collection is greater than the sum of its 
parts, but that greater value is only perceptible by machines. 
This past week I heard an excellent presentation (it is not yet 
online, but when the link becomes available, I will post it) by a 
biostatistician, who commented that human access to such 
databases is "of low value," in contrast to the "higher value of 
robot access."

Data and text mining are sometimes being discussed in the context 
of the idea of "Web 2.0," but I think this is a mistake.  Web 2.0 
is a concept of Tim O'Reilly's to describe the emerging practices 
on the Internet today in the areas of community-building and 
user-generated content.  Web 2.0 is a metaphor, not a technical 
specification--but a very valuable metaphor. O'Reilly, for 
example, distinguishes between the early Web (his 1.0) and the 
evolving Web by contrasting Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 
Wikipedia. Both 1.0 and 2.0, however, share the fact that the 
users are humans.  Data mining is a game for machines.  It would 
be inaccurate to call it "Web 3.0" because machines don't require 
a Web interface at all.  Web 2.0 is post-modern, but data-mining 
is post-human.  Today's neologism:  the Post Human Internet, or 
PHUNET for short, pronounced either FOO-net or (my preference) 
PEE-YOU-net.  See Charles Stross's novel Accelerando.

Whether or not database mining of this kind will yield the kind 
of new insights some believe it will, I do not know, but it would 
be useful for the rights situation to be clarified early on to 
fend off litigation at a later time.  It seems likely to me that 
publishers will begin to separate human- and machine-readable 
rights, just as they distinguish between subscriptions for 
libraries and individuals.  There is an interesting precedent put 
forward by some members of the library community, who argue that 
it is reasonable for publishers to charge for hardcopy, but 
electronic materials should be free.  It is conceivable that over 
time the "low value" of human-readable rights will become Open 
Access, leaving the higher value PHUNET rights for aggressive 
economic exploitation.  It boggles the mind to think what a large 
collection of science articles could be worth some day.

Joe Esposito