The Data Economy, Health Data and the Lexicon of Property: Comparative Remarks

This paper outlines the different lexicons of property in the civil law and common law legal traditions (§2) and it discusses the European Union approach, showing that the initial option for data property has gradually shifted toward the access perspective, even if some provisions of the recent Data Act question the common understanding according to which the property discourse has been abandoned (§3). Against this background, the paper focuses on the legal regime of health data according to the GDPR (§4) and the proposal of a Regulation for the European Health Data Space (§5). After having considered the approach adopted in the UK after Brexit (§6) and the debate about data property in the US and the UK (§7), it finally comes to some conclusive remarks (§8).