Defining ownership of data

In recent years, the predatory exploitation of information on the internet has highlighted the problem that there's no clear definition of ownership of data on the internet. Huge corporations are pushing the big data paradigm to hoard as much information as they possibly can, in the hope that it can be mined in the future to create additional value. This value will obviously fall into the hands of the companies doing the hoarding themselves, not the original creators of the information being hoarded. While big data and data mining have their obvious valuable use cases, their drawbacks must be clearly understood to be effectively addressed.

While certain types of information are protected by different types of legislation, there's no generic legislation that can be used to define ownership of data, and control its use, as well as profit from its usage. There is intellectual property and copyright legislation to protect ideas and created content. Trade secrets, legislation...