Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

We’ll also need practical arrangements to address fundamental questions around data ownership. We need to enable groups to share data without giving up their ownership and ongoing control of the data they share. Just as landowners sometimes enter into easements or other arrangements that allow others onto their property without losing their ownership rights, we’ll need to create new approaches to manage access to data. These must enable groups to choose collaboratively the terms on which they want to share data, including how the data can be used. In addressing all these issues, the open-data movement can take a page from open-source trends for software. At first that effort was hampered by questions about license rights. But over time standard open-source licenses emerged. We can expect similar efforts for data.

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