Legal and Ethical Aspects

Legal and ethical issues are an important topic when dealing with language and text data. Copyright law takes up by far the most space here, but privacy and data protection aspects as well as the CARE principles also play important roles.

In Text+, lawyers from the Leibniz Institute for the German Language and the German National Library offer support on legal and ethical issues relating to language and text-based research data. Contact can be made at any time via the Text+ Helpdesk. Please note that Text+ cannot offer individual legal advice.

For text and data mining (TDM), German copyright law has had a barrier

  • i.e. an exception - in Section 60d UrhG since 2018, which describes the conditions under which researchers are permitted to carry out TDM. This TDM exception was amended in 2021 to transpose the European Union’s DSM Directive into German law. Text+ has published a publication on this (Assessment of the Impact of the DSM-Directive on Text+), accompanied by a handout that serves as a decision-making aid for the most important questions regarding the TDM barrier.

A further publication is currently in progress, which deals with the legal aspects of derived text formats. The publication is planned for the end of 2024.

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