Expanding climate-smart agriculture relies on deploying artificial intelligence- (AI-) driven digital technologies, such as big data, machine learning and deep learning. Farmers are concerned about sharing their data because they fear it may be mishandled by untrustworthy parties and used against them, particularly as they typically encounter two primary legal challenges in AI-enabled climate-smart agriculture: data ownership and privacy. The patent system does not adequately govern ownership of farm data as it mainly protects inventions: raw data, such as farm data, does not meet the criteria for patent classification. Farm data is unlikely to be eligible for copyright protection. In Europe, data producers may own farm data if they can prove substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the database contents through the “database right.” Trade secrets are the most effective intellectual property rights to establish ownership of farm data.
