Text and Data Mining in the Slovenian Legal System

The Slovenian implementation of the text and data mining exceptions in Articles 57a in 57b of the Copyright Act provides both very progressive elements of the European TDM exceptions implementation and also problematic ones.

The TDM exceptions allow the digitization of analogue works for the purpose of TDM as well as the remote access to content and, in the case of the TDM exception for scientific research, also the sharing of the results for TDM purposes, which is a very progressive implementation worth repeating elsewhere. Rights holders also need to ensure that the beneficiaries of both exceptions can effectively perform TDM and need to act within 72 hours or face sanctions.

Consequently, the Slovenian legal order represents a favorable legal basis for building models of generative artificial intelligence.

The problematic aspect of the Slovenian implementation is that it does not explicitly consider access to the content freely available online as lawful access, as is otherwise explicitly stated in the Recital 14 of the DSM Directive. In this regard, artificial intelligence builders in Slovenia can be significantly worse off, and it is reasonable to expect that the legislators will correct this error in the future.

Despite this obstacle researchers who build open-access LLMs for Slovenian or other languages have a good legal basis for collecting texts and building datasets, sharing them with others, and building LLMs on the basis of the Slovenian exception.