The Music Industry Should Inspire Our Perspective on Data Ownership, Says IIA Exec

In the music industry, artists are paid royalties for the use of their work and technology both maintains their rights of ownership and distributes their intellectual property, Sagi Dagan, head of the growth division at the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), said. Dagan spoke Monday at Calcalist and Israel’s Bank Leumi’s Mind the Tech conference in Tel Aviv.

If successful artists’ intellectual assets are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, it might make sense to consider that some ownership rights on other forms of data on various web services should belong to the users that created them, Dagan said.

The question of ownership over data is complex but crucial to the future of the data economy, Dagan said. “If you look at my Gmail account—I create the emails I send, but not the ones I receive and the financial value is derived from an aggregation of several accounts or the storage infrastructure,” he said. Medical files are even more confusing, he said. “The medical file may be mine, but I did not create the diagnoses within it, so who owns it?”

Sagi Dagan. Photo: Yariv Katz