Know your data rights

Data is flooding into the business through all sorts of conduits, for all sorts of purposes. There’s data you are officially licensed to use; data you’ve got permission to use; open data; data from social media; data scraped from somewhere on the internet. Once inside the organisation, it gets hard to track contractual obligations. There’s a real danger that, if you don’t really know what you’ve got and what you can legally do with it, you can expose your organisation to risk and liability, especially when it comes to using that data for commercial gain. You could easily end up embroiled in a dispute, facing allegations of breach of contract and/or infringement of third party rights.

The first step is robust data management. It’s not just a legal thing but a management discipline; and we have developed a proprietary software tool to help. Most disputes arise from a failure of process. However, when data is managed properly, you can quickly check if the licence lets you use/manipulate the data for a specific purpose. Or that there is no licence in place.

Our team will help you put in place a data management strategy and advise you how to best lawfully collect, aggregate and exploit inbound data. And don’t overlook the data you generate. We’ll help you work out what rights apply and how you can protect and maximise its value to your business.