Property of the Social Media Data

Hans-Bernd Schäfer () and Ram Singh ()
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Ram Singh: Delhi School of Economics

Chapter Chapter 2 in Law and Economic Development, 2023, pp 13-46 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The internet technology allows the harvesting, storage, processing, and marketing of large datasets about persons and things. The raw data often contain protected information on individuals. Internet regulation must therefore achieve three policy goals. It must protect the privacy of internet users. It must incentivize the production of derived new and socially valuable datasets and consequently open access to raw data from data controllers and it must prevent the use of data for unproductive, purely redistributive purposes, often resulting from unfair business practices. The current global legal situation achieves none of these goals. It allows the internet giants to achieve market dominance and make monopoly profits, divert income streams, cut off potential competitors from the access to raw data, and reduce consumer welfare. And it does not sufficiently protect personal data. The efficient use of raw data cannot be achieved by competition law alone but rather through a combination of different property rights, an alienable erga omnes right for the subjects of information to protect their privacy, and open access to depersonalized raw data for competitors, which would remove the current de facto property of data controllers by trade secrets. Processed and newly derived datasets should, however, remain protected by copyright law.

Keywords: Data protection; Markets for data; Social media; Competition law; Property of data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24938-9_2

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