The Legal Regulation of Digital Wealth: Commerce, Ownership and Inheritance of Data

Digital wealth and its necessary regulation have gained prominence in recent years. The European Commission has published several documents and policy proposals relating, directly or indirectly, to the data economy. A data economy can be defined as an ecosystem of different types of market players collaborating to ensure that data is accessible and usable in order to extract value from data through, for example, creating a variety of applications with great potential to improve daily life. The value of data can increase from EUR 257 billion (1.85 of EU Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) to EUR 643 billion by 2020 (3.17% of EU GDP), according to the EU Commission. The legal implications of the increasing value of the data economy are clear; hence the need to address the challenges presented by its legal regulation. These challenges are as follows: (1) the acceptance, especially from the perspective of personal data protection, that personal data serve as counter-performance in certain contracts; (2) an adequate conceptualization of the freedom of consent to avoid contradictions between the logic of contract law and that of personal data protection; (3) the qualification of data as goods and therefore possible objects of ownership, and the difficulties that this encounters; and (4) the transmission mortis causa of data as a property asset. We will try to outline the problems associated with each of these challenges and propose some solutions.