Reconciling the European Strategy for Data with Copyright

• Jurisdiction: European Union
• Year: 2024

Speaker

Alain Strowel is a distinguished academic and legal professional, serving as a professor at the University Saint-Louis in Brussels and UCLouvain, specializing in intellectual property and media law. He also teaches at the Munich IP Law Center and the University of Alicante.

With a legal career spanning over 30 years, Alain has been an avocat at the Brussels bar since 1988. He spent 13 years at Covington & Burling LLP, monitoring European legal developments. Currently, as senior partner at Pierstone in Brussels, he focuses on intellectual property and tech/data law.

Beyond practice, Alain conducts significant studies for European institutions, with a recent publication on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in 2022. He arbitrates domain name disputes for the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

In partnership with Prof. P. Belleflamme, Alain co-manages the educational blog www.ipdigit.eu. Academically, he's affiliated with the European Law Academy (ERA), Academia Europaea, and chairs ALLEA's Intellectual Property group.

Educationally, Alain holds degrees from UCLouvain and the University of Amsterdam, including a PhD in Law. A prolific author, he's penned over 250 articles and multiple books on copyright law and digital transformation, and edited collections on topics like net neutrality and AI legal challenges.

Topic

The intricate interplay between the EU Data Strategy and Copyright laws has been extensively explored. The comprehensive analysis begins by defining data and its evolving relationship with copyright, emphasizing the complex nature of data as a digital representation of acts, facts, or information.

Strowel delves into the revolutionary impact of Generative AI and Text and Data Mining since April 2019, highlighting tools like ChatGPT by OpenAI and DALL-E's text-to-image capabilities. He underscores the challenges posed by these AI advancements, especially in defining and regulating their output.

The EU Data Strategy, introduced in February 2020, emerges as a pivotal point in his discourse. Strowel emphasizes the strategy's vision of creating a single European data space, fostering innovation, and balancing data flow with privacy,...