Data Commodification and the Law

Data have become a crucial element of today’s economies and societies, which has in turn sparked a vivid debate on how data shall be regulated as resources out of both efficiency and fairness concerns. The European Union embarked on the ambitious project to create a ‘European single market for data’, thus turning data into tradable commodities through various initiatives including legislative ones. Data are an uneasy legal object and their role as resources cannot be easily untied from their other dimensions. In particular, data protection law (with the flagship GDPR) addresses the harms that data processing by others can cause to individuals identifiable through data and, ultimately, to democratic societies. A crucial question is thus whether EU data legislations geared toward the establishment of data markets can be squared with personal data protection. Based on her doctoral research, Charlotte Ducuing addresses this question with a novel and original approach based on commodification studies. A must-read to understand data legislation, its commodification dynamics and their impact on data protection law and to take a fresh perspective on the GDPR.

Charlotte Ducuing is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for IT and IP Law of KU Leuven. She holds a Master's degree in law (University of Lille) and in political sciences (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Lille) and a LLM Intellectual Property and ICT law (KU Leuven). Besides having experience as an in-house lawyer in the Belgian railways and as a teaching assistant at the ULB, she has conducted research on various aspects of the datafication of society. Her doctoral research project (2020–2024) sougth to evaluate the legal soundness of the compatibility model of EU data legislation between data markets and data protection, based on commodification studies. Charlotte engages with infrastructure studies, the regulation of public utilities, commodification studies, regulatory studies and legal theory. More in general, she is interested in how the law addresses complex socio-technological artefacts.

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