SEEING BEYOND THE LEX SPECIALIS PROVISIONS OF THE DGA

As it clearly appears from the Data Strategy, the Data Act and the DGA, the Commission and the EU legislature see both such legislative frameworks as connected one to the other. They together form the horizontal framework for data, which I identified as the decentralized private law ordering for data, to be further complemented with sector- or domain-specific ‘public law‘ initiatives. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Data Act follows mainly the property law objective to provide a primary allocation of data (use and value). Then, the expectation of the EU legislature is that the actors, namely, in the context of the regulation of connected product data, mainly users and selected third parties, can then make further use of data and especially share them in various ways through the support of data governance institutions as regulated under the DGA. While the Data Act requires mandatory data access or making available as a means to re-allocate and distribute data, the DGA lays down a range of mechanisms that support voluntary data sharing.

The DGA consists of three main chapters, pertaining allegedly to three different types of scenarios in which data are voluntarily shared. Chapter II applies to data held by public sector bodies on which third parties have rights (thus deemed outside of the scope of the Open Data Directive).