New EU Data Protection Will Conflict With IP Rights

The Pending EU General Data Protection Regulation will directly impact many U.S. companies: The GDPR, explains this post from Foley Hoag, “will apply to entities established outside the EU that offer goods or services to individuals in the EU and/or monitor the behavior of data subjects within the EU.” For IP practitioners this will raise some especially knotty issues, because some obligations and rights the GDPR creates will conflict with what are normally considered IP rights. The right of portability of personal information, for example – that is, the right of consumers to take their personal data as collected and held by company A and forward it to competitor company B – may conflict with what company A considers its proprietary technology. Companies will also need to be aware that “profiling,” which has become an essential element of many U.S. company business plans, may become an issue. IP practitioners, the authors warn, “should be aware that the European Data Protection Authorities do not like profiling at all.”