At the last International Forum on Computational Law (IFCL) at Tsinghua University, Christiane Wendehorst gave a keynote on "The Proposal for a Data Act - Selected Observations on Data Rights and Mandatory Data Sharing". In her speech, she highlighted the fact that EU data policy, since the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has undergone remarkable changes, switching from a principle of data minimisation to almost something like a principle of data maximization. 

"The European legislator recently seems to be opening all floodgates and switching to the opposite extreme."

Wendehorst explained, in particular, how the 2022 Proposal for an EU Data Act draws upon the theory of rights in co-generated data, which she had developed during her work on the ALI-ELI Principles for a Data Economy. While the Proposal is visibly based on her theory, Wendehorst demonstrated that there are also significant differences between her original theory and the far-reaching data portability right the European Commission is now proposing for connected devices and related services. 

The theory of "rights in co-generated data" is increasingly being recognized as the most appropriate conceptualization of data ownership, and the theory has been adopted, inter alia, in work by UNCITRAL, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) and the German Data Ethics Commission.