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Microsoft has proposed several agreements that companies can use to share data across different computing systems and services. There are three draft proposals for similarities for different scenarios.

Companies have always been able to share data, but according to Microsoft, this is often chaotic. This is because there are no consistent and standardized conditions and license agreements. The three draft proposals should solve that, writes Silicon Angle.

Open source

The agreements are designed to save companies months or years of negotiations to create their own contracts, says Erich Andersen, corporate vice president and chief IP counsel of Microsoft, on LinkedIn. In this way, Microsoft is trying to set up a kind of open-source licensing structure for data sharing. In the open source industry, there are several pre-approved licenses that companies can use if they want to share source code. These include the Apache and BSD licenses. We want to do for data what open source did for code, says Andersen. The proposals are published on the Microsoft website, where the company asks for feedback and input to make them better. The draft agreements are shared under Creative Commons licenses.

Three agreements

At the moment there are three proposals for agreements online. The first is an Open Use of Data Agreement, which governs the sharing of open datasets that do not include personal data or data owned by a data provider. According to Microsoft, this is the most open contract with the least restrictions.

There is also the Computational Use of Data Agreement. This Agreement is about datasets that are intended to train artificial intelligence and contain materials from third parties. These are datasets in which some information is open and another part is protected by copyright. The protected elements may not be republished or redistributed.

Finally, there is the Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development. This contract is designed for underlying data with elements that may contain privacy. It is also designed for when data is owned by the controller of the data.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.