Microsoft is working on agreements that enable easy data sharing for individuals and organizations

Sharing data among individuals and organizations can help address some of society’s biggest challenges. However, legal issues associated with data do not allow individuals and organizations to easily share their data with others. To solve this problem, Microsoft is releasing a set of draft agreements for consideration by the community. These agreements are created to address a specific data sharing challenge, read about them below.

• Open Use of Data Agreement (O-UDA) – This agreement is intended for use by an individual or organization that owns or has the rights to distribute data for unrestricted uses. This is a “one-tomany” agreement and is intended for use with data for which there is no privacy or confidentiality concern.
• Computational Use of Data Agreement (C-UDA) – This agreement is intended for use with data sets that may include material not owned by the data-providing individual or organization, but where it may have been assembled from lawfully and publicly accessible sources. This agreement allows a provider to make the data publicly available only for “Computational Purposes” (activities necessary to enable the use of data for analysis by a computer, like machine learning). This is a “one-to-many” agreement and is intended for use with data for which there is no privacy or confidentiality concern.
• Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development (DUA-OAI) – This agreement provides terms to govern the sharing of data by an organization with another for the purpose of allowing
  that second organization to use the data to train an AI model, where the trained model is open sourced. This is a “one-to-one” agreement and contemplates the sharing of data for which there
  may be privacy and/or confidentiality concerns.

Even though there are some existing data sharing agreements, Microsoft developed these new ones to be a much shorter and simpler for sharing data. For example, the Computational Use of Data Agreement (C-UDA) addresses an identified gap among existing public licenses – sharing data sets that include material that the distributor may not own but which was lawfully accessed from publicly available sources and therefore legally permissible for computational uses.

“We’ve developed three data use agreements for community review and input. We have drawn from precursors, but are also advancing some new thinking drawn from our own experiences in working on data sharing projects. Hopefully you will see some of this experience come through, particularly in the annotations,” wrote Erich Andersen, Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel at Microsoft in a post on LinkedIn.

You can learn more about these data sharing agreements here.

Source: Microsoft