Data Rights Management Agreement

What Sort of Contract is This?

This Draft Standard Data Rights Distributed Management Services Agreement by Scott David of the Washington University Law School is the second version of a previous legal draft called the Standard Data Store Data Management Services Agreement. These drafts demonstrate an approach to legally structuring personal data services by contractually defining the key roles, relationships, rights, responsibilities and other relevant rules.

Why is This Full of Awesome?

And This draft agreement represents deeply refined legal sophistication and reflects significant experience with best contracting practices across a range of commercial and other private sector markets. The draft document demonstrates how standard clauses could be composed in theory, assuming that businesses and other parties chose to engage in the lines of business and provide the types of services envisioned by the document and to arrange their business roles and relationships accordingly. Whether or not a marketplace develops exactly as imagined according to the explicit and implied contexts and scenarios of use contemplated by the draft contract, this document is of high value as an exemplar and a well of potential concepts and options for future exploration and experimentation.

How Does This Relate to the MIT System Rules for Personal Data Services?

Both the Washington University Law School and MIT Personal Data System Rules drafts provide methods for parties to agree upon the provision, use and/or reliance upon personal data services. Iteration of a version of the Washington University draft agreement compatible with the MIT Personal Data System Rules is being explored as a possible basis for further collaboration. As a first step toward harmonization with the System Rules approach, this file has been extracted from MS Word, transformed to pure text and loaded into this GitHub repository for display using Markdown and in preparation for markup, tagging and formatting with XML, JSON and other methods necessary for the content to be expressed as machine processable rules and parameters capable of driving or triggering data-driven business and legal work flows or other procedures.