On Monday 14 March, the European Commission opened a period of stakeholder input prior to the adoption of its future proposal for a Data Act.
This text should ultimately facilitate access to and use of data - mainly from business to business and business to government - and strike a balance between data access rights, data investment, and maintaining a high level of protection.
The Commission intends, through this proposal, to restore fairness in the bargaining power between parties when it comes to data sharing, to harmonise the conditions applicable in cases where sectoral legislation makes access to data mandatory for the benefit of certain parties, and to improve legal certainty as regards access to and use of non-personal data generated by several parties.
To this end, several avenues are proposed. Among them, the Commission puts forward the idea of a transparency obligation for manufacturers of connected objects, the introduction of ‘B2B fairness tests’, which would aim to verify that the conditions of access to data have not been imposed unilaterally, as well as the harmonisation of horizontal data access arrangements. Sectoral specificities could be introduced.
The future legislation would also address the issue of data portability. Obligations could be introduced for companies selling smart appliances or home assistants, as well as for cloud services.
As regards the latter, the Commission proposes three scenarios, with, on the one hand, a limitation to clauses already existing in the industry, on the other hand, the formulation of high-level legal requirements or, finally, more specific legal requirements “defining distinct conditions of contractual, technical and economic nature”.
See the initiative: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/13045-Data-Act-&-amended-rules-on-the-legal-protection-of-databases_en (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)