Much Ado About Data Ownership‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA") (1) Privacy Rule, (2) a major federal regulation affecting health information privacy, is criticized both for hindering access to health data (3) and for allowing too much data access. (4) similar concerns (5) surround the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, (6) or "Common Rule." (7) While designed mainly to protect people who serve as subjects of experiments, (8) the Common Rule also applies to informational research (9) that merely uses people's data or biospecimens. (10) It thus plays an important role in regulating access to, and use of, people's health data. These regulations evolved over a twenty-eight-year period that began when the National Research Act of 1974 (11) set up a National Commission (12) to develop the Common Rule. The period ended in 2002 when the HIPAA Privacy Rule was promulgated in its present form, (13) which draws heavily on concepts from the Common Rule. (14)