What does your fridge know about you? Field guide to non-personal data collecting and exchange

Data are becoming an asset in their own right which is more and more often the subject of commercial exchange. This does not only mean personal data. It also, or even primarily, means non-personal data of all sorts, including that generated or gathered by machines and the value of which we are only beginning to discover. Non-personal data has great commercial and scientific value; it is a key business asset and a basis for development of the digital economy and artificial intelligence. Hence, the competitiveness of companies depends on access to relevant data.

However, as with any matter, lawyers must intervene and apply legalese to data economy. The proposed workshop is to discuss legal aspects of data economy, specifically:
•    ownership (if any) of data; can data be owned? If not, what rights can be exercised over data?
•    various layers (dimensions – e.g. ,physical, syntactic or semantic) of data and the significance in law, 
•    protection (if any) of data as intellectual property; is data an IP asset at all?
•    aspects of competition law with regard to collecting and data sharing e.g., risk of abuse of dominant position by refusal to grant access to data in breach of EU case law, problems of data sharing.