Abstract: Data ownership, data rights, data interests, data property rights, data intellectual property rights, and many other concepts form a conceptual spectrum of data rights. Among them, data property rights and data intellectual property rights and the boundary between the two urgently need to be reorganized in their respective theoretical systems. Data property right is unique to China’s policy documents and belongs to the property right in the sense of economics, but it can be transformed into “data right” in jurisprudence, which in turn can be constructed into many rights or items such as holding, possessing, accessing, reproducing, using, sharing, gaining, disposing, and so on, and linked to the market mechanism. The term “data intellectual property” is inherently unscientific and does not conform to the usual legal conceptualization. This term or concept focuses more on how to recognize data in the field of intellectual property and explores such questions as whether data can be protected by intellectual property rights, what its relationship is with information property rights, and whether it is necessary to create new types of intellectual property rights related to data. Therefore, it is necessary to further analyze and reflect on data property rights and data intellectual property rights, which have different theories and arguments. They have a certain degree of intersection in application and should be reconstructed in a utilitarian interpretation.

Key Words: data property rights; data intellectual property rights; information property rights; subjects of data sources; data factor markets

Author: Yao Jia, senior editor, CASS Institute of Law; Professor and doctoral supervisor, Law School, the University of CASS;

Source: 1 (2025) Journal of Shanghai Institute of Political Science and Law.