„Data has become an essential resource for economic growth, job creation and societal progress. Data analysis facilitates the optimisation of processes and decisions, innovation and the prediction of future events. This global trend holds enormous potential in various fields, ranging from health, environment, food security, climate, and resource efficiency to energy, intelligent transport systems and smart cities.
The 'data economy' is characterised by an ecosystem of different types of market players – such as manufacturers, researchers and infrastructure providers – collaborating to ensure that data is accessible and usable. This enables the market players to extract value from this data, by creating a variety of applications with a great potential to improve daily life (e.g. traffic management, optimisation of harvests or remote health care).“
Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions "Building a European Data Economy" (COM/2017/09 final) from 10.01.2017
In line with the Commission’s efforts, LIBRe Foundation is trying to address the following rudimentary questions: what does the broad notion of “data” represent?; can data be a subject of specific rights and more specifically – intellectual property and ownership rights?
LIBRe Foundation Team will conduct further research on the legal framework of public-data access and the fundamental rights of natural and legal persons to receive public information. What is the relation between the right to access to public information and open data? Is the provision of access to raw public data a sufficient measure, satisfying the citizens fundamental rights, without ensuring any meaningful and accessible tools for the extraction of knowledge and meaning from this data?
LIBRe experts are also looking into the legislative requirements on the access of data, held by the private sector: are private entities obliged to share data with other private entities or with the state, under what circumstances, what is the necessary criteria for access, what is the nature of rights, protecting such private data – rights in rem, in personal, intellectual property rights or sui generis?
Special research focus will be given to data rights in three specific fields, where the Foundation’s team has been accumulating expertise in the last couple of years: unmanned aircraft, education and healthcare.
