On the evening of April 12, 2019, the lecture “Data Ownership and Competition Law”, hosted jointly by the Center for Social Responsibility and Governance of the Law and Technology Institute and the Academic Innovation Team of Constitutional and Departmental Law, was successfully held at the Mingde building, Law School, Renmin University of China. The lecture was delivered by Prof. Yong Lim, Associate Dean of Seoul National University, and moderated by Guo Rui, Associate Professor of Renmin Law School; Professor Wang Qinghua from Beijing Normal University, Associate Professor Zhang Jiyu from Renmin Law School, Professor Xiong Bingwan and Dr. Long Rui from Zhong Lun Law Firm attended the lecture.

Prof. Lim pointed out the key significance of data to today's digital competition and business model innovation from the status and value of data in the era of digital economy, and he believed that data is the fuel driving the digital economy era. In this context, the legal regulation of data seems to be multi-pronged, but in fact it is chaotic. This has spawned a discussion on the attributions of data in practice and in academia – who owns the property rights to the data? Professor Lim believed that due to the nature of the data itself and the close correlation between data usage and the situation, the discussion of data property rights has been unsustainable, and a more realistic discussion is, who has the actual control over the data? Under the existing legal system, many laws such as Contract Law, Intellectual Property Law, Criminal Procedure Law and even the Constitution, may affect the answer to this question. In response, Professor Lim raised the question: Should Competition Law also have a place in the discussion of data control rights? Although judging from the precedents of the United States and the European Union before 2014, law enforcement agencies related to competition law usually remained modest in the face of data privacy issues. However, the German Federal Antimonopoly Service issued a ruling in 2019 that Facebook abused its market dominance in collecting, merging and data usage. The impact of this ruling is worthy of attention. In addition, Professor Lim discussed the multiple effects that data regulation may have on the market, emerging data control subjects and methods, GDPR legislators' intentions and dislocation of market repercussions.

Afterwards, the participants conducted in-depth exchanges and discussions on the contents of the lecture, shared the debates and related court decisions in academia on issues such as data ownership and data regulation, introduced the practice and confusion of domestic technology companies in data usage, and discussed in-depth with prof. Lim the issues on data ownership, path choice of Legal Regulation on Data Privacy, and different considerations on data privacy issues between different laws from the academic point of view. The lecture ended satisfactorily with endless heated discussions and group photos.