Some thoughts on data rights

Tim O'Reilly was talking about data and data access in his keynote at Oscon2007 today (Wed Jul 25th 2007) I thought I'd post some thoughts I have been chewing on for a while, even while I am still in the keynote. These issues have technical and philosophical implications. They are not about tags per se but do apply very strongly to data currently captive in contemporary folksonomy applications as well as other Web 2.0 applications. Comments and Criticism invited.

A manifesto for data rights in a globally networked world

(Draft 1 Jul 25th 2007) (cc) Published under Creative Commons "Attribution No Derivatives" Licence

We consider the following to be axiomatic and universal

1. Data is a first class citizen of the network.
   
   
2. Data must not be held captive in an application or locked in proprietary application-specific file formats.
   
   
3. Data must be readable and exportable directly, programmatically, completely without restriction and stored in open, non-proprietary formats.
   
   
   
   1. Programmatic data access must allow FULL export and read capability independent of what the human UI allows
      
   2. Arbitrary restrictions must not be placed on data access by the application controlling the data, whether due to unintentional limitations of the application architecture or due to intentional design.
      
   
   
   
4. Every unit of data must be independently addressable via a URI
   
   
   
   1. On the Internet, data should be accessible via REST based architectures
      
   
   
   
5. Every unit of data must be capable of having an associated access policy, separately from other such units of data
   
   
   
   1. Each data unit must be able to have a possibly different access control policy
      
   2. The default access control policy of a data unit created by an individual must be "private"
      
   3. Policy change must be under the free control of the individual,
      
   4. Policy change must be under the control only of the individual.
      
   
   
   
6. Data is property. Hence data access and ownership must be subject to rights strongly similar to or identical to physical property rights.
   
   
   
   1. No application, service, organization or other entity may require data exposure or implicit surrender of data ownership as a price of use or access to some facility
      
      
   2. Data exposure must be separately negotiated and be freely negotiable without coercion, according to the needs of the individual.
      
   3. "Website shrink wrapped licenses" are not considered to be a a meaningful negotiation in this context.
      
      
   4. Data about an individual belongs to that individual and only to that individual, who may choose to share the data subject to their needs and no one else's
      
      
   5. Data does not belong to the incidental keepers of data representations (internet service providers, medical service providers, financial service providers, state and federal govt agencies)