Legal Barriers and Enablers to Big Data Reuse

Extracting value from big data assets is one of the goals set in the Europe 2020 Initiative. However, a number of influential voices from the academia as well as from the practice have been suggesting that the current European regulation may not adequately address the challenges of big data. This paper aims to identify existing legal barriers and enablers to big data reuse in the EU law based on the approach that follows the traditional dichotomy of laws. In the public law part, we analyse data protection law, privacy law and human rights provisions, data retention law, data localisation law and cybersecurity law. On the private law side, the relevant areas are intellectual property rights law, competition law and consumer protection law. We find that the EU regulatory landscape is highly complex when it comes to data reuse. Claiming that as a general proposition the EU law should be labelled as a barrier or as an enabler does not hold much water. Nevertheless, the most important barriers and enables are identified, which may be useful for further regulating data reuse in order to facilitate a sustainable and dynamic digital environment.