data property rights directly affects the development of the digital economy and requires further exploration.
▲ Image source from Beijing News.
Article|Liu Yuanju
The Fifth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee proposed: “Establish basic systems and standards for data resource property rights, transaction circulation, cross-border transmission and security protection, and promote the development and utilization of data resources.” This statement has attracted attention.
With the development of IT technology, data is becoming more and more important in the operation of the national economy. Data can not only promote production efficiency, but in many cases, it is an important part of productivity and is the basis for promoting the development of many emerging industries. At the moment, with the rapid development of the digital economy, it is time to explore the establishment of a digital resource property right system.
Determine that digital property rights are the foundation of the digital economy.
The so-called data resource property rights, to put it bluntly, is who owns the data? Is it personal or corporate? The question behind this is whether fairness or efficiency is the priority.
economist Harold Demsetz mentioned in his paper "On the Theory of Property Rights": the generation of property rights is essentially a process of cost-benefit weighing. Only when property rights are defined, the benefits of externalities are internalized. Property rights will only be generated when the cost of engaging in this behavior is greater. In short, when the benefits of determining data property rights are greater than the cost of determining data property rights, data has an economic basis for determining the rights.
is now the age of data. In the past few years, data generated by humans accounted for 95% of the total amount of human historical data. Data has become a production resource and has produced obvious benefits. Therefore, the external environment for data property rights has gradually matured. The 14th Five-Year Plan proposes to establish data property rights, which conforms to the development of the times and leads the world.
The first theorem of Coase states: if transaction costs are zero, a clear definition of property rights is a necessary and sufficient condition for optimal allocation of resources. No matter who assigns property rights at the beginning, the final result of market equilibrium is efficient and can reach Pareto optimality. This is the famous theory of "non-property rights".
However, the real world is more complicated. The second theorem of Coase further elaborates the relevant truth: in the presence of market transaction costs, different property rights allocation systems will bring about different efficient resource allocations and bring different economic benefits.
Therefore, the choice of the property rights system is necessary, and the value of the property rights arrangement is very valuable to the entire economic operation. To some extent, Coase's second theorem is the core part of Coase's theory of property rights.
In other words, the ownership arrangement of data property rights can directly affect the entire data-related industry. At the time when the digital economy is becoming more and more important, this property rights arrangement has a pivotal effect on the overall economic development.
▲ Image source from Beijing News Network.
Data property rights still have ambiguities
In the era of mobile Internet and social media, everyone is consciously generating data. In this kind of user-generated content behavior, users create their own data by taking photos, videos, small videos, Meipai, and Moments via mobile phones. The property rights of
these data are basically clear, but there are also ambiguities. There have been strange incidents in which different platforms have asked users to modify their avatars and nicknames after disputes over their avatars and nickname data. Another example of
is that in September 2017, the user agreement of a social platform stipulates that without the prior written permission of the platform, users shall not directly or indirectly use the content of the platform in any form by themselves or by authorizing any third party. After violent criticism, the platform stated that the rights belong to users. Data generated consciously by users like
is generally considered to belong to users according to simple intuition, but it can also produce a certain degree of ambiguity. Compared with these conscious data, the data generated by users unconsciously, such as data generated in consumption, travel, and medical care, has more obscure property rights. The vagueness of data property rights involves privacy and will also affect the development of the digital economy. If the data is only owned by the enterprise, the enterprise may abuse it, and the user has no right to interfere. On the other hand, if it is only owned by the user, it also violates the principle of fairness.
After all, although this type of aggregated data is essentially a collection of personal data, it needs to be collected, managed and stored, and even mining to generate new data and knowledge, which requires considerable costs. Moreover, if only the userAll, the value of the data itself is also lost. Not only will users lose convenience, the entire digital economy will also lose its foundation.
Another example is artificial intelligence, which often involves a large amount of user data. Then, who should be the data rights generated by it?
Microsoft's face recognition database is a typical example. Prior to this, Microsoft quietly deleted its largest public face recognition database-MS Celeb. The MS Celeb database was established in 2016. Microsoft described it as the world's largest public facial recognition data set, with more than 10 million images and nearly 100,000 facial information. The most direct consideration for Microsoft to delete face data is to worry about infringing on the public's privacy and "data rights" and creating legal risks.
Microsoft uses the "Creative Commons" license to capture facial information in images and videos. Under the "Creative Commons" license, photos can be used for academic research. But more importantly, the "Creative Commons" license only comes from the authorization of the copyright owner of the pictures and videos, but Microsoft does not necessarily get the authorization of the people in the photos and videos directly. Therefore, the people corresponding to these faces may accuse Microsoft of infringement, which may cause legal problems.
From this example, whether the property rights of the data belong to the copyright holder of the photo or the person in the photo, or how to distinguish between the two. This legal issue will seriously affect the development of the industry. In other words, the ambiguity of data attribution will directly affect the development of the digital economy. The
property rights have the characteristics of clarity, exclusiveness, transferability, and operability. But at the same time, compared with physical objects, data has its own unique characteristics, such as mixing, complexity, reproducibility, and uncertainty. These characteristics all make the data property rights system difficult and require further exploration.
Solving this problem is a requirement of the digital economy and a problem that China's economic development must solve. Lincoln said that “the patent system is to pour the oil of interest on the fire of wisdom”. To a certain extent, data property rights are also such a system. By establishing property rights, it generates benign interest incentives, thereby promoting the digital economy and even the entire economy. Healthy development.
□ Liu Yuanju (Columnist)
Editor: Xinwu Intern: Pan Yujie Proofreading: Zhao Lin
