Research. Businesses, politicians and scholars all call for property rights in data. But this should be avoided according to a research paper from University of Californation.
“Various parties are actively staking their claims to data on the Internet of Things, as they are mining data, the fuel of the digital economy. The data generated is valuable to various persons and entities for different reasons, including safety, risk assessments, compliance, preventive maintenance, market intelligence, development of new business models, public policy and law enforcement, among others. But much of the sought-after data will relate to personal and private information of various individuals (e.g., regarding their health, travel history and speed, browsing history, and emails), which raises privacy concerns and questions of who may access and use the data generated by the various connected things. These questions are often framed as issues of data ownership or property rights in data in the popular press and political discussions,” says the report No One Owns Data
And then the author Lothar Determann concludes that no one does or should be able to own data, as data exists separately from works of authorship, databases and media, is largely free from property rights, is subject to a complex landscape of access rights and restrictions, and implicates various legal positions, interests and options for parties interested in the data that are regulated in a considerate, nuanced and balanced fashion under laws outside the property law realm.
