FOCUS ON CONNECTED PRODUCT DATA

At the time of writing, the Data Act is not yet in force. Hotly debated during its legislative adoption, the Data Act seeks to walk a ridgeline. On the one hand, its goal is to unleash the potential of data held by private actors to fulfil their alleged potential in being used and reused for various purposes, thus requiring data sharing. On the other hand, the Data Act recognizes that data sharing may have to be qualified for a number of reasons including the preservation of incentives for private actors to keep investing – which takes the legal form of the utmost care for their trade secrets – and personal data protection. To walk this ridgeline, the Data Act proceeds with surgical touches. While the Open Data Directive is based on the principle that data held by public sector bodies should be made available to the general public for further reuse, the Data Act regulates more or less extensively a few – non-exhaustive – situations in which data sharing is required, accompanied with conditions.

In this chapter, I focus on one such situation: Connected product data, namely data generated by the use of products such as smart wearables, smart farming machinery, connected cars, etc. Connected product data constitute a prime example of the attempt of the EU legislature to lay down provisions that look and taste like property law for data while accounting for what are considered to be their specificities. Connected product data have long been a key concern of the EU data policy and especially the key focus on the ‘data producer‘ s right ‘ option once contemplated by the Commission (and then abandoned).