In this Report, we focus on legal requirements relevant to OPTIMIS in order to achieve compliance of the project with European legislation and efface legal uncertainty. Without doubt, cloud computing raises particularly complex legal issues which can potentially put the overall goal of OPTIMIS at risk. However, this risk can be successfully mitigated if OPTIMIS is aware of these issues and implements compliant technical solutions.
We analyse the fields of law relevant to OPTIMIS, namely Data Protection and Data Security, Intellectual Property and Green Legislation and specify the legal requirements for the project. We follow a high level approach by assessing the legal problems at European level in order to ensure compliance across the various jurisdictions of the Member States.
As regards data protection, we find that the national law applicable depends on the location of the data centres and statutory seats of the cloud providers. Also, the role of data controllers in OPTIMIS is not fixed, but depends on the specific cloud scenario at stake.
There are many intellectual property issues concerning ownership and rights in information and services placed in the Cloud. In some cases it is easy to decide who owns the data but in some others it is difficult to separate between the rights of the owners and those of the service providers. We attempted to raise and answer some of these questions.
Concerning green legislation there are many legal and non-legal issues to take into consideration and compliance with these legal requirements together with de facto stand-ards, metrics and industry initiatives is mandatory.
In conclusion, OPTIMIS should distinguish the stakeholders and clearly assign the level of influence on the processing of data in the Cloud. Clarifying intellectual property rights between all the stakeholders is very important for the outcome of the project and further exploitation of the end product. Compliance with Green legislation is mandatory not only for environmental reasons but rather for the socio-economic implications relevant for the project.