Data as Tradeable Commodity and New Measures for their Protection

Information, particularly important, significant and relevant information, as illustrated by current Big Data or Wikileaks and Prism or more recently Tempora, is today’s ‘digital gold’. From an economic perspective it is therefore relevant to know whether and what kind of data content can be protected. The key question to be answered is therefore whether data can be recognised in law as ‘protectable rights’. In the digital world, data are in fact an important ‘res intra commercium’, namely tradeable goods, the legal protection of which even today remains the subject of considerable debate. More recently, the problem of deleting data in the internet and the ‘right to be forgotten’ has been discussed in connection with search engines and social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram or – most recently – Google. Such discussion now informs the background of impending EU regulations for the general protection of data.