Esra Demir (Erasmus University Rotterdam) has posted Legal Uncertainty on the Protection of Human Biological Data: Can the Identification of an Owner Be a Protection? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Data collected and stored in biobanks hold great promise for the improvement of healthcare. However, this huge amount of data also raises unresolved legal and ethical questions. One of the pressing questions concerns the lack of legal certainty to protect data. To overcome the uncertainty, the discussion of the legal framework has long focused on the concept of ownership and its compatibility with data. This article aims to contribute to the debate on the legal uncertainty underlying the protection of human biodata by examining the EU acquis on data ownership and asking whether there is a need for ownership rights to protect biodata and whether owner identification could be a solution. Through doctrinal legal analysis, it is argued that without a special justification that demonstrates the necessity of ownership rights to data from an economic and social perspective, biodata should not be the subject of general ownership rights.
