Ragavan recently posted some interesting thoughts on DataLiberation that got me thinking:
Another factor to consider is how you define what “your data” is. For example, if you look at it as just exporting your photos out of Picasa and importing them to flickr, I’d posit that’s a rather simplistic view. A large part of what makes your data useful and valuable is all the relationships associated with it. I share my photos with my friends and family, I license some under Creative Commons, I group them, I tag them – all of these make my data very context rich. How do you liberate this context? And if you do, what does it mean to import them elsewhere?
On a public forum I used to frequent, one user used to immediately delete all his posts whenever he lost an argument. In the context of Data Liberation, this could be considered a good thing: his posts were his data, not the property of the company (or rather, the volunteer community member) hosting the data. But on the other hand, his behavior also made entire conversations completely inscrutable to everyone else in the community. What used to be an interesting public dialogue between two people suddenly became one person talking at a wall.
It’s very easy to assume that the things we create are ours, and not some corporation’s: but what happens when you give what you created to someone, or to a community, or to the public? Does the ownership of that information become theirs to any extent?
If you take a photograph and give it to your grandma, what kind of rights should you have to take it back? Should grandma have the freedom to copy the photo you gave her—by posting it to your photo stream on Flickr—to her computer’s hard drive before you delete it from Flickr? Or should you have the freedom to be able to magically zap your data from her hard drive?
Who actually owns the data?
My name is Atul Varma, and I'm the co-founder of a small Chicago company called 
Well, I’m with Karl Fogel and the whole http://www.questioncopyright.org movement. Once ideas or information are shared, they’re infinitely reproducible — and the whole concept of “owning” intellectual property seems immoral and artificial to me. Taking credit? Sure. Demanding attribution? Sure. Plagiarism is always a problem, particularly when the only real irreplaceable resource is reputation. But to say that somebody has the right to restrict the usage of their idea — it’s just absurd. Once an idea is communicated, it’s not “yours” anymore, it becomes part of culture. It’s a bizarre late-20th century concept that will have to eventually vanish if our culture is to thrive.
I think there are two types of data-ownership:
1. Data you own because it’s on your computer, and
2. Data you own the rights to
I have a lot of music on my computer, I own that data because it’s stored on my personal property but I don’t own the rights to that data, I can’t make illegal copies of it.
In the case of the photo and grandma it’s a matter of whether you bought the picture from a store, or whether you were the one who took the picture. A gift in which you own the object, but not the rights, I think passes ownership. Therefore if you don’t own the rights to the gift, then it becomes theirs. If however you own the rights too, well then that can’t just be given away along with a gift.
It’s interesting to think about data ownership in the context of collaboration and knowledge generation. If your data is part of a larger context that is more than the sum of its parts, what is your responsibility to keep that data within that context? On GetSatisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/) users can delete initial posts if they haven’t been answered yet, but once a conversation has been started, you can’t delete your own post anymore. Similarly, you can’t go back and edit your responses to threads, because they are part of a larger context. However, users expect more control over their own responses, and I believe GetSatisfaction is considering adding the ability to edit posts.
You bring up an awesome point in regards to consequences… a prime example is _why’s disappearnace from the internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff).
While I never read, or followed _why, I know he was a internet-nerd-celebrity - and his content was consumed by various means. Nobody expects it to go away in a flash. Yet it’s his data.
As much as the URL purist in me says that every URL is sacred and nothing should ever disappear into thin air… the pragmatist says this is reality. If your neighbor has a nice tree which gives you plenty of shade… she may one day cut it down.
Cheers.
It’s one thing to export your data. It’s another thing to delete that data that provides vital context for others (i.e. posts on a forum).
The latter I think should not be possible. However the former should be, and RDF would be a good format of choice for the export of such data.
I especially appreciate your decision to end this on a question. I don’t think the question will ever be answered fully.
But it’s a very important question.