Article 2 – Definitions

‘consent’ means consent as defined in Article 4, point (11), of Regulation (EU) 2016/679;

‘permission’ in the context of Chapters VIIa and VIIc means giving data users the right to the processing of non-personal data;

This Council draft drops the change the Commission proposed. It deletes nothing from the law in force.

‘data intermediation service’ means a service which aims to establish relationships of an economic character for the purposes of data sharing between an undetermined number of data subjects or data holders and data users, through technical, legal or other means, including for the purpose of exercising the rights of data subjects in relation to personal data, and which:

does not have as its main purpose the intermediation of copyright-protected content;

is not jointly procured by several legal persons for exclusive use among them;

‘data holder’ means a natural or legal person that has the right or obligation, in accordance with this Regulation, applicable Union law or national legislation adopted in accordance with Union law, to use or make available data, including, where contractually agreed, product data or related service data, which it has retrieved or generated during the provision of a related service;

‘public sector body’ means the State, national, regional or local authorities of the Member States and bodies governed by public law of the Member States, or associations formed by one or more such authorities or one or more such bodies.

‘bodies governed by public law’ means bodies that have all of the following characteristics:

they are established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character;

they have legal personality;

they are financed, for the most part by the State, national, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law; or are subject to management supervision by those authorities or bodies; or have an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, national, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law;

‘public undertaking’ means any undertaking over which a public sector body may exercise directly or indirectly a dominant influence by virtue of their ownership of it, their financial participation therein, or the rules which govern it. A dominant influence on the part of the public sector bodies shall be presumed in any of the following cases in which those bodies, directly or indirectly:

hold the majority of the undertaking's subscribed capital;

control the majority of the votes attaching to shares issued by the undertaking;

can appoint more than half of the undertaking's administrative, management or supervisory body;;

‘data altruism’ means the voluntary sharing of data on the basis of the consent of data subjects to process personal data pertaining to them, or of permissions of data holders to allow the use of their non-personal data without seeking or receiving a reward that goes beyond compensation related to the costs that they incur where they make their data available for objectives of general interest as provided for in national law, where applicable, such as healthcare, combating climate change, improving mobility, facilitating the development, production and dissemination of official statistics, improving the provision of public services, public policy making or scientific research purposes in the general interest;

This Council draft drops the change the Commission proposed. It deletes nothing from the law in force.

‘common specifications’ means a set of technical requirements, other than a standard, that provides means of complying with certain requirements and obligations established under this Regulation.

‘medium-sized enterprise’ means a medium-sized enterprise as defined in point 2 of Annex I to Recommendation 2003/361/EC;

‘small mid-cap’ or ‘SMC’ means a small mid-cap enterprise as defined in point 2 of the Annex to Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/1099;

‘university’ means any public sector body that provides post-secondary-school higher education leading to academic degrees;

‘standard licence’ means a set of predefined re-use conditions in a digital format, preferably compatible with standardised public licences available online;

‘document’ means:

any content that is non-digital whatever its medium (paper or as a sound, visual or audiovisual recording); or

any part of such content;

‘dynamic data’ in the context of Chapter VIIc means data, subject to frequent or real-time updates, in particular because of their volatility or rapid obsolescence; data generated by sensors are typically considered to be dynamic data;

‘research data’ means data, other than scientific publications, which are collected or produced in the course of scientific research activities and are used as evidence in the research process, or are commonly accepted in the research community as necessary to validate research findings or results;

‘re-use’ means the use by natural or legal persons of data or documents held by:

public sector bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public task for which the data or documents were produced, except for the exchange of data or documents between public sector bodies purely in pursuit of their public tasks; or

public undertakings, under Chapter VIIc Section 2 for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than for the initial purpose of providing services in the general interest for which the data or documents were produced, except for the exchange of data or documents between public undertakings and public sector bodies purely in pursuit of the public tasks of public sector bodies;

‘high-value datasets’ means data and documents the re-use of which is associated with important benefits for society, the environment and the economy, in particular because of their suitability for the creation of value-added services, applications and new, high-quality and decent jobs, and because of the number of potential beneficiaries of the value-added services and applications based on those data and documents;

‘certain categories of protected data’ means data held by public sector bodies which are protected on the grounds of

commercial confidentiality, including business, professional and company secrets;

statistical confidentiality;

the protection of intellectual property rights of third parties; or

the protection of personal data, insofar as such data fall outside the scope of Section 2 of Chapter VIIc;

‘secure processing environment’ means the physical or virtual environment and organisational means to ensure compliance with Union law in particular with regard to data subjects’ rights, intellectual property rights, and commercial and statistical confidentiality, integrity and accessibility, as well as with applicable national law, and to allow the entity providing the secure processing environment to determine and supervise all data processing actions, including the display, storage, download and export of data and the calculation of derivative data through computational algorithms;

‘re-user’ means a natural or legal person who was granted the right to re-use data or documents held by a public sector body or a public undertaking under Chapter VIIc or to research data or certain categories of protected data;

‘machine-readable format’ means a file format structured so that software applications can easily identify, recognise and extract specific data, including individual statements of fact, and their internal structure;

‘open format’ means a format that is platform-independent and made available to the public without any restriction that impedes the re-use of data;

‘formal open standard’ means a standard which has been laid down in written form, detailing specifications for the requirements on how to ensure software interoperability;

‘reasonable return on investment’ means a percentage of the overall charge, in addition to the amount needed to recover the eligible costs, not exceeding 5 percentage points above the fixed interest rate of the ECB;

‘data localisation requirement’ means any obligation, prohibition, condition, limit or other requirement provided for in the laws, regulations or administrative provisions of a Member State or resulting from general and consistent administrative practices in a Member State and in bodies governed by public law, including in the field of public procurement, without prejudice to Directive 2014/24/EU, which imposes the processing of data in the territory of a specific Member State or hinders the processing of data in any other Member State;

‘draft act’ means a text drafted for the purpose of being enacted as a law, regulation or administrative provision of a general nature, the text being at the stage of preparation at which substantive amendments can still be made;

‘pseudonymisation’ means pseudonymisation as referred to under Article 4(5) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.