Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
This article undertakes a comparative legal analysis of the data-governance paradigms of the European Union, the United States, and China, with particular emphasis on data property rights, data assetization, and cross-border data-flow regulation. The EU grounds its data governance in fundamental rights. While the GDPR establishes a strict privacy framework, it actively rejects the propertization of data. As a result, the economic activation of data assets remains largely unaddressed in European law. The United States relies on contractual self-governance and trade-secret law to achieve de facto data ownership, yet lacks a coherent public framework for data-factor markets. China, through its innovative ‘Three-Right Separation’ framework – disaggregating data entitlements into the right to data-resource holding, the right to data processing and use, and the right to data-product operation – represents the most ambitious attempt to date to reconcile privacy protection, national security, and the systematic economic activation of data as a factor of production. This article argues that none of the three paradigms has achieved a fully satisfactory equilibrium, and that the construction of effective data-governance frameworks requires ‘institutional bricolage’ – drawing selectively upon the EU’s principle of derivative-data exclusion from mandatory sharing, the US’s sophisticated contractual mechanisms for allocating residual control rights, and China’s institutional innovations in data registration, exchange, and balance-sheet integration.

Ji, Jiapeng, The Legal Construction of Data Property Rights: A Comparative Study of the EU, US, and China (April 10, 2026).