A data licensing agreement is the contract that sets what a licensee may do with licensed data: the dataset covered, permitted and prohibited uses, exclusivity, territory and term, privacy and security duties, retention and deletion, warranties about rights, liability limits and payment.
Why it matters when licensing company data
For AI uses, the clauses that move value most are the permitted use (training, fine-tuning, evaluation or retrieval), exclusivity, whether models trained on the data survive termination, and who carries the risk if the data turns out to contain something it should not.
The data licensing agreement checklist walks through each clause, and the due diligence guide covers what a buyer will check before signing.
Source
Cornell Law School LII: license. Definition reviewed November 7, 2026 by Origin Data Partners.