Can we make a law that all data collected by devices that I bought belongs to me? Yes, that includes everything the websites I visit send back to the mothership.
Classic work-for-hire includes ghostwritten novels and autobiographies, corporate reports, web pages, and most likely every line of code you've ever written while employed by a corporation.
There are jurisdictions where moral rights cannot be sold, and others where they can, but work-for-hire nearly always sidesteps the issue.
I agree that preventing a person to choose to sell something they own is a restriction on their freedom. But problems arise when the negotiation of that exchange is unilateral, relegated to EULAs and contracts which are incomprehensible, non-negotiable, and mandatory to purchase the product, and performed in a less-than-perfectly-efficient market.
It would be one thing if I could buy a Tesla, a Nest, or log onto a site with ads, and the process included a step where I could elect to share my data, to not share my data, or to give them the data and promise not to ask for it back, with different price points for each.
It's another thing when giving people the freedom to give up certain rights results in all manufacturers requiring people to exercise that freedom in order to purchase products.
The market is far from efficient. There is no car that's just like a Tesla but costs more by the value of this data exchange. There is no negotiation of the contract with Tesla, it's built into the purchase price and required by the legal department.
Observing that the market is pervasively inefficient in a way that leads to a bad outcome, and devising regulations that correct the inefficiency, is precisely why we have laws and governments.
In prior times, such covenants were also used to try to racially segregate property, by forbidding sale to a person of a race the covenant's creator disliked (such covenants are technically still valid, but unenforceable by US courts).
And they're sometimes used for other things, too; I recall there was a house near my college's campus that the college wanted to purchase and use, but the owner had set up a restrictive covenant that would forbid any later purchaser/inheritor from selling it to the college.
I did this by accident when I "bought" an iPhone a few years ago and was told I couldn't keep it after I water damaged it and got a replacement. I started buying devices outright after that.
Got to amazed at chutzpah some companies have, my favorite whipping boy is Onstar. Here my nice little car has the ability to notify authorities in a crash BUT only if I pay for that service. Now on one hand I would not mind a nice small fee per month, say five bucks or less for something that would infrequently used if ever, but with Onstar the lowest cost is 24.99 a month!!
fwiw, when I had my car new they would even send driving reports, like when the system decided i accelerated to hard, braked too hard, and such. Real joy in what they collect AND sell to third parties
Once money exchanged hands, it's not their product, it's mine, as is _all_ of its output, including logs, etc.
Otherwise, I'd call it 'spyware'.
Here's an example: You go to the library (or a privately owned web cafe), and write your stories there. It doesn't matter that you don't own the device. It's still your data.
That's BS. The real justification for anyone having that right is that 1) the data is about them and 2) they own the machine that collected/created the data.
> The device manufacturer/website owner/etc does the work of creating the data, yet you think it's yours?
They did the work of creating a device for sale. After the sale, their rights to the device end and the data should be owned by the new owner.
Like visiting websites while not logged into anything in generating tons of data, but it can't be easily linked back to you.
It would be possible to link some of it back to session IDs or other things you could be linked back to your device, but that doesn't show it was you using the device, so they may be releasing data belonging to someone else using your device to you. And that is before we get into possibilities like cookie hijacking or other methods of falsely tying your device to that generated data.
The argument here is that the company knows who the data belongs to, and the person above is saying that they shouldn't be able to abstract "you" away from the data and claim it as their own property.. especially because, as we know, most anonymization techniques have serious flaws that in fact do allow individuals to be identified after close scrutinization.
I agree that your proposal would be a good extension. Or at least that it should be the default, and you'd need to sign for being okay with not owning the data. Or that those devices contain warning stickers.
Sounds like PII!
But the post you're replying to wasn't about copyright at all.
If I'm allowed to take the 5th to not incriminate myself and not reveal my memory (data in my head), I should be similarly allowed to delete my data when it is my data in my device.
It'd be an interesting case to take to the Supreme Court.
The next step in your scenario is "that security camera has data on me, I want it deleted".
The link provided by wang_li applies and it seems such questions have come up in the past in front of courts, and honestly I won't be surprised if they come up again.
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...