14.III.4 Ownership of equity pre- and post-trade data

There is an intellectual property discussion on the ownership of (equity) pre- and post-trade data. The debate can be divided in two camps, for the sake of simplicity, data suppliers and data users. Data suppliers (in particular RMs) argue that equity pre- and post-trade data is the result of substantial investment and hence data suppliers producing the data have all intellectual property rights concerning the data.1 The data suppliers also claim that market participants do not buy (license) back their own data. What has value in view of the data suppliers, and what data users pay for, is to see the entire market, that is – the equity pre- and post-trade data of other markets participants.2

Data users disagree. Data users claim that the produced equity pre- and post-trade data is based ‘solely on information from market participants trading on that market, including all input data’. The result would be that data producers do not have intellectual property rights of the equity pre- and post-trade data.3 The idea here is that market participants engaged in a trade get ownership, which would allow the market participants to use and sell the data about their own trades (instead of only the data producer). Data users believe that, as an additional advantage, the price of market participants selling the data themselves (besides the data producer) can function as a benchmark for ‘reasonable’ equity pre- and post-trade data prices.4 It is also questioned if a ‘simple figure like a ‘price’ contains enough intellectual depth to justify to be protected under applicable EU IP (intellectual property) rights’.5

Although dating back for decades,6 the ownership debate is gaining new momentum.7 A logical explanation for the renewed interest is the increased demand for equity pre- and post-trade data. As noted, technological innovation and fragmentation of EU equity trading since MiFID I has amplified the value of equity pre- and post-trade data. Despite the increase in value, market participants (in particular data users) – and not the EU – have until this point in time mainly initiated the debate on ownership.8 Although important, ownership of equity pre- and post-trade data is not (yet) a key topic of EU equity pre- and post-trade transparency regulation. The situation might change in light of the increased value of equity pre- and post-trade data in the EU equity markets.