Φ Pardalis Data Ownership Blog

Introduction

In early January, 2008, Ed Felton, a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton, posted Scoble/Facebook Incident: It’s Not About Data Ownership on Freedom to Tinker.

“Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should Facebook be allowed to control how the data is presented and used? What about the interests of Scoble’s friends?

An interesting [idea] kept popping up in this debate: the idea that somebody owns the data.

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue.”

I agree with Professor Felton that legal ownership is not the best way to think about data ownership.

Fred Von Lehmann, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responded to Felten’s posting by helpfully distinguishing legal ownership from technological ownership.

“Speaking as [a patent] attorney, Felten got this exactly right — there is no “ownership” of the facts in question.

But even if there were, it wouldn’t answer these questions. Consider sites like Flickr. Unlike the facts in Facebook, the photos on Flickr are plainly copyrighted works. But that doesn’t tell you anything about whether the copyright owner is entitled to access Flickr’s servers to make copies of the photos.

Your ownership in an intangible (copyright or patent) does not come with any right to access particular copies of it that reside elsewhere. Flickr can delete all of your photos, and if you failed to make back-ups, nothing in copyright law would provide you recourse.”

Another commenter, only identifying himself or herself as Spudz, made a sage comment about the natural fear factors that keep information from being shared.

“One thing worth adding here is that Facebook has no need to police potential abuse of shared information. There’s a natural mechanism to deal with that: people won’t share information (on Facebook or elsewhere) with people they don’t trust, and people that abuse trust stop being trusted. These are ancient social mechanisms that work adequately on any site where a user gets to choose to expose information only to specific other users. Mechanisms tens of thousands of years old, if not older.”

I’m guessing that Spudz is either a political scientist, sociologist or anthropologist.

Anyway, what Scoble did was to engineer an automatic means for the porting of the names and e-mail addresses of his Facebook friends out of Facebook's database and into to the database of a Facebook competitor. On the one hand, this isn't a new news item. But it remains an everyday, omnipresent issue in that Facebook, Flickr and all other dominant social networking sites will need to solve this dilemma. They will need to solve it to survive the ever increasing expectations of their users and subscribers for information portability that are bound to come with an emerging Semantic Web.

And why not? Arguably, one of the essential purposes of the emerging Semantic Web is to empower people and businesses with the choice of more and more technological control over their information that they may aptly call ‘data ownership’ for short. Their expectations for an emerging Semantic Web have no doubt been raised from the online banking of their money, and the online purchase of products and services.

To echo what Spudz said above, what we at Pardalis have noticed is that as supply chains lengthen and fragment, the ownership and control of product information deemed confidential by each supply chain participant becomes rapidly affected by fear factors. And what we have further noticed is that the 'frayed ends and laterals' of complex product supply chains appear to look and behave a lot like social networks.

So here is the essential question of this multi-part journal entry:

Where social networks and supply chains overlap, what opportunities are there to find technological data ownership solutions that address the fear factors working against both portability (between social network websites) and information traceability (along complex product supply chains)?

[continued in Part II]