Data Protection Law & Policy - invitation to write

[Steve Holcombe]

Hi, I'm an attorney. Legal ownership over information is about privacy
regulations covering non-artistic content, and copyright regulations
covering artistic content. There is a large world of non-artistic
information over which the only protection that an information
producer has is to retain control by not sharing that information. An
example would be the origin or pedigree of a typical product along a
supply chain which, typically, is not shared. In my opinion the focus
of Dataportability.org should be upon empowering information producers
(whether within social networks or along product supply chains) with
technological control over their information. In other words, shift
the paradigm from privacy and copyright (i.e., the prevailing legal
data ownership paradigm) to direct technological control (i.e., a
technological data ownership paradigm). By way of example, 'Personal
Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm'
at

http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2008/5/22/personal-health-records-data-portability-and-the-continuing.html

[Elias Bizannes]

Thanks for posting this Steve, but damn I forgot what I was going to
ask you now!

Your argument seems similar to Nitin's[1] (and others[2]), which is
about treating data like some form of property ownership. I am still
uneasy about that interpretation, and see your view about
technological control is akin to 'where the data is stored, is
therefore owned by the owner of the storage facility and then can do
with what they want with it'. I think what we need to be arguing is,
is forget about who has possession of the data - as long as you have
control over the benefits of its usage, then that's all you need. It
dodges the complex ownership issue (which personally I conclude no one
owns data, but I am willing to concede information is owned in the
hands of the possessor) and it merely recognises if you have access to
that data, that's about as good as having it sitting on your lap as a
CSV file.

As a case in point - being about to store my health records on my
windows media server is not something I get terrible use out of. All I
want, is for when I see a doctor, the doctor I am using at that time
can access my health data from elsehwhere. It's not about who possess
that data, but as along as they recognise my right to get the economic
benefits from the usage of that data, then life is good.

Another example, if I was to get some of my data out of an application
but it came in some type of encryption, this denies me the right to
the benefita - I don't control the benefits of usage. In this
scenario, having possession of the data is useless. So whilst
possession is a useful term to define ownership; ownership is not the
solution to the problem. Control over the benefits of that data is.
And control can be mandated not on how owns it, which is one way, but
also on what rights you have to use that data.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/dataportabilityactionpolicy/browse_thread/thread/585babcdfa7b2a68
[2] http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=117


On May 30, 12:48 pm, Steve Holcombe <steve.holco...@pardalis.com>
wrote:

> http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2008/5/22/personal-health-record...

[Gordon Rae]

A case has just come to trial in the UK, in which a former employee of
a recruitment firm has been ordered by the High Court to hand over the
business contacts he built up on LinkedIn. The judge ordered Mark Ions
to disclose his LinkedIn business contacts and all emails sent to or
received by his LinkedIn account from his employer's computer network.
Full article in the Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/16/cnlinked116.xml

This prompted JP Rangaswami ( aka 'Confused of Calcutta') to blog
about the case in terms that will make sense to Elias and others on
this list:

"Musing about the Whose Data Is It question... for a moment there I
thought that the value was in the relationship and not in the contact
information."
Full story here: http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/06/17/musing-about-the-whose-data-is-it-question/

Gordon Rae

> [1]http://groups.google.com/group/dataportabilityactionpolicy/browse_thr...

[Elias Bizannes]

Thanks Gordan, very interesting.

I literally am screaming to get the DataPortability's Project
governance issues settled, so I get back into this policy area which
is fascinating the more you dig.