**When ownership gets transferred**
*Smooth case
I recently moved offices, and did not want to move my
desktop displays: I had been offered new displays in the new location. I just
had to administratively transfer the ownership of the displays I was leaving to
another department at that location. Done, moved on.
*What silver coins
teach us
My grandmother gave me once a silver coin valued 5 French
Francs. I thought she had given me 5 FR I could spend. She got into the habit
of giving me more such coins, now and then, a few times per year.
I kept the coins in a drawer, thinking they were accumulated
as pocket money does, and I could spend them when the occasion would occur. I
remember that in those years you could get very nice vinyl records for 15 FR in
a Montparnasse shop (central Paris).
Now we got to speak about it with my grandmother, and it
became apparent that it was not the view nor intention of my grandmother that I
would spend this pocket money. The coins were given to me for… KEEPING. She saw
these as collection items. Silver coins with currency value were ambivalent: they
could be seen as 5 FR, or as a weight of silver valued as such. It was not
meant as a coin like any other, but as a
personally TRANSFERRED FROZEN ASSET from my grandmother as the GIVER to me as
the KEEPER, not exactly the happy recipient.
Much later, I read about the Bretton-Woods agreement, and
the following history of suspending the convertibility of currencies to gold,
starting with the dollar in 1971. The veil of the money and the veil of metal
convertibility of money, are wise explanations from economists for real
microeconomic situations.
A main thing I would take for big data from this observed
case, is that when transferring source data, from one producer or other seller
to a buyer or user, the data as IT record of file is transferred, but it is
also transferred with economic and contractual/legal expectations and rules of
use. This also happens if the data is open or free.
*From music
Recorded music has shown us different patterns of transfer:
-open market, with competing
publishers, and users able to shop around as I did in Montparnasse
-direct peer to peer online,
possibly illegal
-closed market places as iTune,
working as an integrated value chain.
*From organ donation
Organ donation brings us closer to personal data and
parameters (such as biological measurements):
-one donates a part of their body
-one expects with right that this
body part be used very carefully, with a genuine best effort to save someone’s
life.
To avoid the grandmother’s syndrome above, organ donations
are anonymised, except in obvious cases such as direct and immediate donation
to a family member.
Well, closer even to real-time big data, flowing, blood
donations are also very carefully managed, end to end.
*And now, for big
data?
The question this leads us to is: what happens to data once
it is transferred from one economic agent to the next? What “ownership” with
rights and responsibilities gets transferred? What is then a fair transfer
price?
By the way, as long as the source data does not result (at
the processing stage considered) into an end-user service being sold, it is
free of VAT J.
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