EU (Non) Remedies to Inflexible Copyright: Contracts as a Policy Tool

Abstract

To paraphrase the question asked by the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle: who holds the keys to innovation in a data-driven economy? A lot has been written about the personal data collection and generation ecosystem that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center, born from an ambition to create a network of information collection as means of improving national security. The massive global network that emerged, employing a myriad of companies aiding the Big Tech giants’ data collection by creating millions of data points in apps, websites and connected devices, siphoning data and monetizing it, had for many years evaded the attention of the general public. The eyes of the world began turning towards the issue around the time when Shoshana Zuboff’s book on omnipresent data collection and monetization, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, rose through the charts in 2019, with Barack Obama naming it one of his top books of the year. Around the same time, discussions on the market implications of the new data economy were on the rise again, giving rise to literature demonstrating how the age-old mechanisms of some actors grabbing the means of production—in the traditional take, these were labor, land and money—have now emerged again, giving rise to a new generation of industrial tycoons without an industry, massive platforms propertising intangible resources and giving rise to a new brand of information capitalism, ruled by economic actors that control the flows of data.