Professor Sean Flynn will be visiting the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Information and Innovation Law (CIIR) this week. He will be presenting to CIIR colleagues a work in progress on models that international copyright law could use to enable cross border uses of research materials, such as a text and data mining corpus contributed to and shared by researchers in different countries, that rely on copyright limitations and exceptions for their existence. The work is being conducted in the context of recent developments in the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), including the recent African Group proposal for a Work Programme SCCR/42/4 Rev. calling for concentrated work toward international instruments on the Action Plan priorities, including “to promote the adaptation of exceptions to the online and cross border environment, such as by permitting teaching, learning and research through digital and online tools.” The African Group’s initial proposal called attention to several specific models to allow cross border uses of works enabled by limitations and exceptions: “the cross-border use provision proposed by Argentina (SCCR/33/4)” which is modeled on Article 5 of the Marrakesh Treaty; “the legal fiction model adopted in Article 5 of the 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.” Professor Flynn’s work will respond to this call with initial analysis of these and other models to enable cross border uses of research materials relying on limitations and exceptions.

CIIR is one of the world’s leading center’s for the study of international copyright. Its faculty include international copyright experts Jens Hemmingsen Schovsbo (past President of ATRIP), Jørgen Blomqvist (former Director of the Copyright Division at WIPO), Thomas Riis (copyright law expert), Sebastian Felix Schwemer (IP and technology law expert), and others.