The European Commission presented a ‘Shaping Europe’s Digital Future’ strategy to help ensure that digital transformation works for everyone.
In the digital economy, data has emerged as the most coveted asset, fuelling innovation, guiding strategic decisions, and shaping the future of many industry sectors.
Data Act
A key regulatory cornerstone of the digital economy in Europe. It was published on 22 December 2023 and it enters into force from 11 January 2024.
The Data Act aims to regulate the use of privately held data by the public sector, data access and use in business-to-business situations (including review of the Database Directive), data portability, interoperability, establishing more competitive markets for cloud computing services and safeguards for non-personal data in international contexts. More specifically, the objectives of the Data Act concern the following:
Business-to-government data access
Promote fair reliable and transparent, access to and use of (big) data sources held by private companies that can be valuable for innovative uses and the digital transformation of delivery of public services and better policymaking in a more flexible manner.
Business-to-business data access:
Improve data and application portability between cloud computing services in the whole data economy. This could include addressing contractual, technical and/or economic barriers, faced by business users, to portability between cloud services, resulting in a stronger position of business users and a more competitive and open European cloud market.
Improve technical standards for portability of data generated by individuals. The objective is to allow consumers to have more choice with respect to services around such objects, services that would depend on having access to certain data generated by these objects.
Jurisdictional conflicts: The objective is to reduce the risk of conflicts of laws and the legal uncertainty they generate for service providers, notably providers of cloud computing services, and establish clear safeguards and transparency for non-personal data of EU companies that may be subject to disproportionate foreign access requests. The objective is to clarify the position of data processing services subject to conflicting jurisdictional requirements for disclosure of data while respecting the EU’s international obligations in the WTO and bilateral trade agreements including in the areas of services, investment and intellectual property rights.
Data Governance Act
The Data Governance Act was the first legislation tabled as part of the EU’s data strategy. The aim of the legislation is to help facilitate the transfer of data in the European Union and with third countries through neutral data intermediaries; free up repositories of public data; and enable citizens to donate their data for the public good e.g., for medical research, through acts of “data altruism”. The Data Governance Act entered into force on 23 June 2022.
For Bird & Bird data sharing and access obligations are a cornerstone of expertise within the Digital Rights & Assets Group. We have gathered regulatory and legal specialists in all relevant sectors across the world in the Global Data Access Expert Team. The team focuses on identifying the potential impact of data sharing regulations on your business and is ready to assist you with anticipating regulatory developments, advocacy and compliance throughout the entire legislative process, from draft to final adoption and implementation. The specialists will be able to advise on the impact of this for businesses coming from a variety of relevant angles, whether it is data protection, intellectual property or competition law.
The Digital Rights & Assets European Digital Strategy Developments tool gives you an instant oversight of the state of play. For advocacy with respect to data sharing, go to Regulatory & Public Affairs.
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