Date of Award

10-2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD)

Abstract

When Sir Isaac Newton said his famous statement "standing on the shoulders of giants," it was a modest phrase and explained the necessity of sharing knowledge or information to make the next intellectual progress. The data industry is now the fastest developing area, but many ambiguities are a subject in law. The protection of data is a fascinating and still unsolved challenge for intellectual property law. Data is essential in the matter of new industry and our lifestyle at individual, corporate, and institutional levels. And the legal protection needs to work to offer vivid transactions of data for creative interactions. However, many enterprises consider data an asset for business profit as the data industry grows vast and fast. Data raises diverse policy debates that arise in the better-known intellectual property areas, for instance, copyrights, unfair competition, and trade secret. The vague aspects of data implicate a number of intellectual property approaches. It also extends to the economic problem 'tragedy of anti-commons' that fragmented ownership is disrupting sound usage.

In this regard, Open Governmental Data (OGD) is one way to resolve inefficiency in the data industry. The government collects massive personal data and reproduces datasets in the process of administration. Many governments give back the public data for private sectors anticipating the data works for new enterprise seed money.

This work looks at three considerations about the legal aspects of data. At first, we will see the necessity of big data in current and reasons for the government to pay attention to open data to the public. The data industry market's inefficiency discourages cumulative innovation in our society and approaches the benefits of sharing data in the private economy or OGD movement. Second, the paper conducts principles of OGD and takes a functional approach in analyzing the related IP laws in database protection and public accessibility. Interestingly various governments are opening data that compares various OGD models from different countries led by other stakeholders, including government, large companies, small to medium enterprises ("SMEs"), and how they work as a member of OGD. Finally, it critiques the current OGD movement and suggests that corporate OGD strategies granting autonomous would help resolve the anti-commons of IP in the big data industry.

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