The Polish Act on open data and re-use of public sector information of August 11, 2021 defines the principles of data openness, the rules and procedure for sharing and transferring public sector information for re-use and entities that provide or transfer this information, as provided for in Art. 1 of this Act. Notwithstanding the fact that this act implements Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 20, 2019 on open data and re-use of public sector information into the Polish legal order (Journal of Laws EU. L. of 2019, No. 172, item 56), these provisions were introduced into the Polish legal order to increase the amount of public data that can be used, for example, to conduct analyses, research or for the purposes of artificial intelligence solutions, including for business and industry or crisis modelling.
The act replaced the previous act on re-use of public sector information of 25 February 2016. The scope of the subject matter of the act includes above all the rules of free sharing of information from the public sector, with specified exceptions as well as the mode and manners of transferring such information for re-use, modified rules for sharing information for state museums, self-government museums, public libraries, research libraries, pedagogical libraries and archives, rules and procedure for sharing research data produced or collected as part of scientific activities financed from public funds and re-use of public sector information, in particular having the characteristics of a work or the subject of related rights.
Undoubtedly, “online intermediation services” is an increasingly popular key term in Polish and EU legislation, which has recently been enriched with the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the single market for digital services (Digital Services Act) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC, which in this issue is of significant importance within the framework of the so-called new “Internet Constitution” created in the European Union as part of the Digital Single Market policy.
The term “intermediary services” can be colloquially understood as Internet services, in the form of a website, used to mediate between the entrepreneur and the consumer.
In the current legal status, from the perspective of copyright issues, Polish regulations do not provide for specific provisions on fair use in the form of text and data mining for commercial purposes. The Polish legislator is currently working on the implementation of Article 4 of Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the digital single market. The following article presents the legal definition and problems of understanding at the statutory level of the legal terms ‘text and data mining’ and the data mining techniques related to this process.
New important regulations for text and data mining, including data extraction for business and commercial purposes
Genesis
Legal issues related to broadly understood data and their use cause a lot of uncertainty in the area of legal definitions. This is due to the fact that the development of IT devices, as well as the entire data mining technology, in its practice of digital legal transactions, is ahead of legislative actions and the legal framework for a safe and legal data processing as part of technological progress. Undoubtedly, the above mechanisms significantly facilitate new technologies, such as data extraction, which can be defined as processing and combining existing data into useful information.
On 13 December 2022, the European Commission launched the process towards the adoption of an adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, which will foster safe trans-Atlantic data flows and address the concerns raised by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its Schrems II decision of July 2020.
The draft adequacy decision, which reflects the assessment by the Commission of the US legal framework and concludes that it provides comparable safeguards to those of the EU, has now been published and transmitted to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) for its opinion. The draft decision concluded that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies.
Key elements of the framework decision:
US companies will be able to join the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework by committing to comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations, for instance, the requirement to delete personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, and to ensure continuity of protection when personal data is shared with third parties.
EU citizens will benefit from several redress avenues if their personal data is handled in violation of the Framework, including free of charge before independent dispute resolution mechanisms and an arbitration panel.
Copyright to archival public photos and photos of museum collections.
Polish law shows the lack of dedicated comprehensive legal constructions as to the rules on which the image of museum collections can be used by web designers. This problem seems to be an interdisciplinary issue and subject to standard copyright protection rules, despite the fact that more and more often the deregulation of IP rights for the digitization of cultural entities encounters comprehensive solutions at the statutory level as part of the implementation of EU solutions. An example of recent legislation is the ongoing work at the Polish Government Legislation Center on a draft amendment to the Copyright Act by introducing a new Art. 262 in order to provide “cultural heritage institutions” with systemic deregulation tools, standard IP protection for the reproduction of works for the purpose of text and data mining for the purposes of scientific research, thus implementing Art. 3 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC (OJ EU L 130 of 17.05.2019, p. 92).
