copyright gdpr software artificial-intelligence
Is the usage of an OCR service causing copyright issues when a photo of a book page is analyzed?
<p><em>Here's the scenario</em></p>
<ol>
<li>A user takes a photo using an app from a book, which might have be <strong>copyrighted</strong>.</li>
<li>The app then uploads the photo to a cloud service in order to analyze it using <strong>OCR</strong></li>
<li>The app receives the OCR result and extracts 100 (most used) words from it in order to process the result within the app</li>
</ol>
<p>According to the cloud provider the data gets deleted on call of the app or within 24 hours. The data is only accessible by the app once. Neither is more than an excerpt extracted nor is the photo accessible once it has been send to that server. Also there is no way the result contains a whole sentence of the page (only single words).</p>
<p><em>My major questions in my head for that case would be:</em></p>
<p><strong>Does making a photo of copyrighted material equals to making an illegal copy?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Does sending that photo to a server to process count as distribution?</strong></p>

<p>If there is a copyright violation then it is by the user; the service would presumably work the same, and be as useful, for text where the user owns the copyright or has a license to do this. As long as the service doesn't actively encourage copyright violation then it is in the clear.</p>
<p>The user might be able to claim fair use or fair dealing (depending on the country). The rules vary between countries and are too fact-specific to analyse here; it would depend on things like whether the end user is making money out of it and if the result is used in scholarship. However the fact that only the 100 most-used words are retained would generally count in favour of fair use.</p>
