Data ownership

Data ownership is the philosophical and legal concept of an entity owning the rights to control access to a particular set or group of data. Legally, data ownership is determined by the laws of the nation in which the data is being used. Laws concerning data ownership vary greatly not only from continent to continent, but also from nation to nation.
America
American laws consider research data to be intellectual property and therefore qualifies for the same legal protections of copyright. In addition, research data is often assumed to be the property of the institution that commissioned the research through a process known as "works for hire".
France
Personal data ownership is covered under the 1978 Data Protection Act (Loi Informatique et Libertés). Laws concerned with access to and ownership of data do not exist. Ownership of data also allows the owning entity to decide how to define and control the data and to determine how the data is to be used. Data owners are responsible for defining, compiling, managing both the sale, delivery distribution and security of the data. Data ownership also comes with a responsibility to store the data, and keep the data up to date. This becomes more difficult with data types that update frequently. Because of the large amount of responsibility associated with the maintenance of the data, some data scientists such as Scofield (1998) argue that Data Ownership should be called Data stewardship. In order for data to be considered effective, the owner of the data has a responsibility to update it frequently in order to ensure the data is still relevant, come up with a system to categorize and make the data usable, and allow those looking to access the data to understand how to use it. Arguments for increased regulation of data ownership laws encourage more control over the sale of human data. Concerns have also risen over how patient data must be handled. in 1991 Fishbein argued that patient and financial records should be made available to the subjects. Failure to make data free and available can result in the government's intent being questioned. The Open Knowledge Foundation, an international organization that specializes in data openness and freedom of access scores nations based on the openness of the data, with a higher score indicating that the data is more free or available. Open Data is still owned by the organization that created it in accordance with the legal definitions of the nation in question. Governments are not required to make their data open, but many nations have in order to improve transparency.

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