infoJustice

Today Microsoft released three draft data sharing agreements for comment. They are intended to help individuals and organizations share data in order to “address some of society’s biggest challenges and help individuals and organizations be more innovative, efficient, and productive.” The agreements are crafted with an eye towards use in the context of training artificial intelligence models. Comments are being accepted now through October 1 via the email datainno@microsoft.com.

Microsoft’s Backgrounder & FAQs defines the three draft agreements as follows:

1. Open Use of Data Agreement (O-UDA) – This agreement is intended for use by an individual or organization that owns or has the rights to distribute data for unrestricted uses. This is a “one-tomany” agreement and is intended for use with data for which there is no privacy or confidentiality concern.
2. Computational Use of Data Agreement (C-UDA) – This agreement is intended for use with data sets that may include material not owned by the data-providing individual or organization, but where it may have been assembled from lawfully and publicly accessible sources. This agreement allows a provider to make the data publicly available only for “Computational Purposes” (activities necessary to enable the use of data for analysis by a computer, like machine learning). This is a “one-to-many” agreement and is intended for use with data for which there is no privacy or confidentiality concern.
3. Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development (DUA-OAI) – This agreement provides terms to govern the sharing of data by an organization with another for the purpose of allowing that second organization to use the data to train an AI model, where the trained model is open sourced. This is a “one-to-one” agreement and contemplates the sharing of data for which there may be privacy and/or confidentiality concerns.

The draft agreements are available at https://news.microsoft.com/datainnovation , along with further information about the initiative.

Comment from PIJIP Prof. Michael Carroll:

“These draft agreements are well aligned with the approach that open copyright licenses have taken to sharing. The approach is to be as plain-language as possible while providing enough legal clarity to be useful to both data providers and data users. This is a welcome development.”

Comment from PIJIP Prof. Sean Flynn:

“Microsoft has just taken another important step in its embrace of open platforms, software and data. The one time critic of Linux and the open software movement is now using open source software as the backbone for a massive number of its own products. Its acquisition of GitHub – and maintenance of its independence – connected it with tens of millions of open source developers and repositories. And now it is taking a page from Creative Commons by drafting and opening for comment a set of clear and usable open data agreements. PIJIP is pleased to me working more with Microsoft on our areas of converging interest supporting open access to data and knowledge.”

Microsoft has given a gift to PIJIP to support work around rights to research and analyze publicly available information.