The Data Squattocracy - whose data is it anyway?

Emerging knowledge work disruption

Increasingly many businesses are realizing that disruption is coming to commercial activity that has traditionally traded on knowledge work. Like many professional services firms, project businesses like lawyers, accountants, engineers, quantity surveyors, architects, project managers, management consultants and the like are becoming aware of emerging disruption. Many knowledge based companies, whose primary unit of production has until now been the IP of the individual professional (supposedly supported by productivity improving ICT), are now reacting to emerging technology in order to leverage the value of the data they corporately hold.  

Data Data Data

Over the years, project related companies have gathered data, which until the emergence of big data analytics, AI and other intelligent applications, has mostly been of little value or concern.  In the past some companies have attempted to organize their data, but most knowledge-based project firms have been ambivalent about data leverage. This is because they get paid to reinvent the IP with every new commission with the residual IP vested most effectively in the heads of professionals. Data organization has often been perceived as a complicated, slow, costly and often ineffective process. So the data has expanded increasingly rapidly with digitization, but not been regarded as a serious asset. Now we are entering a period in which data is power and data sets are a valuable resource.

Many of the firms who are current custodians of data sets regard the data as their own intellectual property. In a legal sense, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But let’s look at it from an ethical and equitable community viewpoint. 

How did these organisations get the data in the first place?

Well in the case of a professional project firm (such as a project controls firm for example) they were paid by clients to develop schedule information, which then has formed the basis of what the firm regards as its IP. They did not pay for the data or develop it at their own risk, in fact they developed it at their client’s risk. Is the ownership of this data then vested in the project controls firm? Perhaps legally, if there is no restriction to what the firm can do with the data (because in the past, this present was not envisaged), then they are free to use it, and perhaps they would also claim that they are free to prevent anyone else from seeing it. That sounds like the power of possession, the rights of the squatter.

Australian Squatters

In Australia an early form of securing land use rights was simply to occupy the land, to squat on it. Some of these squatters became very wealthy and regarded themselves as the aristocrats of the colonies, thus the term “squattocracy”. They achieved wealth and power simply through laying claim to exclusive use of the land and over time their claims became practically un-opposable. 

Are we at risk of allowing a data squattocracy to develop? Is this what is best for the community and equitable for all stakeholders? Governments around the world are seeking to create open data environments, but so called commercial in confidence data and/or corporate IP is usually exempt. Naturally every firm will be seek to define any data it even suspects might be commercially valuable as exempt from an open data requirement. However, perhaps we should think about what right of ownership is being exercised in the first place.

Here is a thought experiment. Let us say a Medical Laboratory Business (MLB) undertakes a blood test for me, and I pay them for a service. All the costs of the test, the equipment, the IP of the professionals, the keeping of records and the like have been covered by the fee and MLB has made a profit. This test yields data which, let us say, collectively enables some new innovation which delivers much profit MLB. Assume they have complied with all privacy regulations, perhaps through some anonymisation software, so no breach there. But they have only been able to achieve this additional commercial benefit because I, and many people like me, paid them to create and collect data which comes from my own body. Why should MLB profit from the use of this data without providing benefit to those who paid for its creation, both commercially and physiologically? Perhaps it is fair that the benefit should be shared with those who paid to create the resource.

The data creator

How would this practically be achieved? One simple way is for the state to claim the custodianship of created data on behalf of the community (unless a compelling argument can be made for specific exemptions). In this way the community is able to benefit as a whole from the data value, rather than individual organisations claiming squatters rights, and perhaps leading us to a new era of data squattocracy where the biggest hoarders get the biggest benefit. Some might be concerned about the state as custodian, but the alternative is private sector organisations separately hoarding the data they are squatting on, for which they made no investment to create.  

Maybe this sounds a little socialist, perhaps it is. But the question is weather we want to share in the benefit of our own data, or allow those who happen to posses it to benefit doubly, once when they were paid to gather or create the data, and then again when they exclusively profit from the innovation that arises from it.

There are precedents for this. In Australia you may own freehold title to land, but you do not own the mineral rights to what is under your land. Those rights belong to the community and the community benefits from them. For example, coal miners pay a royalty to the community for the rights to extract the community coal resource. Similarly, when miners undertake exploration drilling, the drill logs and geology (the data) must be reported to the department of natural resources who combines it with other exploration data to form a larger picture to assist all explorers, and thus the community.

The point I am making here is not so radical if you simply think about it in the context of extending open data policies to private sector organizational data. I'm as happy to make a profit from the opportunities that life presents as the next person. But sometimes its worth thinking about what is best for all.

Data philosophy

As the world changes governments must make decisions in the balanced interest of their constituents. Big data constitutes the fuel of a new paradigm of knowledge, which demands philosophical consideration.

 As a community we have the opportunity to consider who should be the owners, custodians, users and beneficiaries of this knowledge resource, as we have with other resources. If we do not actively consider the issue, then existing possession will be the deciding factor.

I throw the debate open !