The theme of the 6th edition of the EUhackathon held at Google headquarters in Brussels last week was ‘visualising copyright evidence to inform the policy debate and support the decision making process’.

The foremost objective of the initiative was to raise awareness and encourage debate around copyright and text and data mining. The goal of the hackathon was to combine data and academic research from various sources to help create a clearer picture of the issues at stake in copyright, as sometimes the full story is difficult to grasp. The challenge was to create visualisations of copyright evidence based on the data sources available at the Copyright Evidence Wiki and other external resources; and/or to enhance the Copyright Evidence Wiki to enable others to easily create visualisations of the data available.

LIBER was one of the supporters of the Hackathon and the FutureTDM project (in which LIBER is a partner) provided some of the datasets to be used.

At the hackathon, we spoke to MEP Therese Comodini Cachia, Rapporteur on the European Parliament Report Copyright in the digital single market, and asked her what she thought can be done to improve uptake of TDM in the EU.

After almost 30 hours of intense coding, there were prizes to be handed over: 5.000 (1st Prize), 2.000 (2nd Prize) and 1.000 (3rd Prize). The award ceremony was held in the European Parliament – prizes being notably handed over by Mr Christian Staat from the Cabinet of European Commissioner Oettinger, MEP Therese Comodini Cachia (EPP, Malta), MEP Kaja Kallas (ALDE, Estonia), MEP Miapetra Kumpula-Natri (S&D, Finland), and MEP Anneleen Van Bossuyt (ECR, Belgium).

First Prize: Team Fakenl (Brazil – Hungary)

Second Prize: Team TheTicks (Romania)

Third Prize: Roberts Dargis (Latvia)

The official EUHackathon video, made by N-square Consulting, the organisers of the EUhackathon, can be found here: https://youtu.be/LutbuLa_vzQ  together with more videos of the event.

LIBER is a partner in the FutureTDM project and responsible for its stakeholder outreach.

Melanie Imming

Melanie Imming is LIBER's EU Projects Manager.