On 31st of March 2021, a virtual workshop on ‘Measures clarifying and potentially further developing rights on co-generated data and B2B data-sharing’ was held on behalf of DG CNECT – European Commission organised by Deloitte, JIIP and Timelex.
Co-generated data is for instance the data generated by machinery when operating in the field. That could be further split up into different types of data such as:
- Related to the working of the machine,
- concerning the operation itself
- related to the operator in a specific setting/site context (personal data) or
- it could be anonymized data.
In this context the stakeholders in this discussion are the data holders, data -producers, data re-users (third parties, data platforms…).
The main target of this exercise is to find the best path to increase value creation, looking into those problems and these gaps not solved yet by existing data laws. One of the main issues is the lack of clear certainty on data rights for which there is no regulatory framework. The result of this exercise will be a new legislation on ‘data use’ with Commission approval the earliest Q4 of 2021.
In this workshop several policy options were discussed regarding a new legislation on ‘data use’:
- First policy option is a non-regulatory policy intervention: it would be an industry driven self regulatory framework. This could be a horizontal effort or more vertical depending on the sector with codes of conduct, like for agriculture. Efficiency of such option depends on the compliance by industrial stakeholders.
- A second policy option is a low-intensity regulatory policy intervention: establishing more legal intervention on content for contracts on issues such as fairness. Therefore, certain elements of a contract would be mandated by law.
- A third option is a high-intensity regulatory policy intervention: the legislation would intervene in depth with horizontal elements over the sectors but also specific elements for the verticals, the specific sectors. In this option the effectiveness will highly depend on the content. Concerning efficiency no real proof of benefits was found and the costs could out way the benefits, therefore rendering it disproportionate.
Deloitte, who performed interviews with different stakeholders from different sectors, in relation to code of conducts on contractual agreements, indicated that many industrial stakeholders would be in favour of a mix of options 1 and 2, where some elements would be more legally binding but others more left to be defined among the industries and different sectors.
