Preliminarily Exploring the Possibility Toward a Holistic Legal Regime for Data Protection

Abstract

Many jurisdictions have implemented data protective legislations. However, these rules of law accentuate personal data protection and it seems that the safeguard of other valuable data is neglected. Premised on the assumption that other data should be under the equal supervision like personal data, this essay deploys a holistic legal approach to briefly construct a data protective regime that incorporates other traditionally protected data including IP-protected data and confidential data in the specific data legislation for policymakers to regulate data comprehensively and effectively However, is this new regime practically feasible? The feasibility analysis demonstrates that the data within the protection of intellectual property (IP) law and confidential law are constrained to a small amount and the extant legislations have already been adequate to safeguard these data. The sufficiency analysis shows that the new regime is inadequate to safeguard various data and many data are out of its regulation. This essay firstly presents a simple holistic data protective regime that illustrates from the scope, process and enforcement regime aspects. The feasibility analysis is followed from necessity and sufficiency perspectives.