Negotiating data rights with vendors

Software vendors may attempt to contract their ownership over data in an attempt to lock in customers. Programs must avoid this by specifying in the vendor contract that vendors do not own any data via a “data rights” clause such as:

“Consistent with FAR 52.227-14, which applies to this agreement, the State intends that data stored within the software provided by the Contractor will be owned by the State.”

Programs must also specify in the vendor contract that the vendor agrees to export records in a machine-readable format (defined as “data in a format that can be easily processed by a computer without human intervention while ensuring no semantic meaning is lost”), and the software must likewise be demonstrated to provide such functionality.