Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies and the Opportunity Arising from Article 17 of the CDSM Directive

In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition “to acquire a leading role in the data economy.” At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to “increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use.” In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong (section A). Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of creative content in EU Member States and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems, will most probably be lost (section B). The problem has a worldwide dimension. While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors (section C). Weighing costs and benefits (section D), there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. The work notification system following from Article 17(4)(b) of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market may offer an unprecedented opportunity to bundle and harmonize data in a shared EU copyright data repository (section E). In addition, a trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, may pave the way for new initiatives (section F).