Contaminations between data protection law and copyright law. Understanding personal data protection rights as a Doppelrecht

The chapter aims to investigate the interactions between IP and data protection law. While most of the time IP is considered a tool for protecting data in cyberspace, here the goal is to analyse how IP should influence the understanding of data privacy in order to reconcile it with the increasing commodification of personal data. In commercial practice, personal data are very often accepted as a counter-performance alternative to money. The existing civil law legal framework struggles to accept this and reveals the frequent and sometimes glaring contradiction between acknowledging the economic value of personal data and denying that they may act as a tradable commodity. The chapter claims that rights over personal data should not be an obstacle to the personal data trade and this is possible without undermining human rights and personal identity. In particular, civil law countries should look at the previous experience of copyright law and consider rights over data as a Doppelrecht, both moral (or personal) and economic in nature.