Information is the real currency of the present day and likely will be for the future. At least until that meteor gets here. It’s been that way for a long time, actually. Think all the way back to World War Two. Information was the key to the war. Whoever controlled the flow of information, the transmitting of it, the encrypting and decrypting of it, would be sure to be the victor.
The Enigma machine was an early encryption device used by the Nazi’s to transmit their most important orders and reports. They considered it to be absolutely secure. Fortunately, they were wrong. The allies were able to decrypt the messages, allowing them to forestall many attacks and shorten the war, saving untold lives as a result.
Today, information and its rapid processing, understanding, and application control trillions of dollars in the global economy. Countries, businesses, and of course individuals rise and fall based on their command of the available data. With that much riding on it, the question of who owns which data has become more important than ever. Not only is it more important than ever, but it is also more complicated. Or so it would seem.
In the case of a patent, or a story, a song, some individual work of creativity, the question of who owns that intellectual property is a fairly simple one. Whomever the creator is, owns the property. However, it becomes much more complicated when it comes to all the piles and piles of data that are generated every minute. Let’s look at an example we’ve mentioned in the space a couple of times before.
John Deere includes a number of sensors on its farm equipment that feed data relating to the machine’s performance and crop yields back to the company. Now, who owns the data? The farmer who generated it? The company for making the equipment that collects it and then pays for the server space to store it, or the company that owns the servers?
Once upon a time, the question was simple to answer, the answer was always based on who owned the servers. Of course, that was in a time before cloud computing and IoT devices. Data was something that company generated by analyzing its own internal production and sales figures and then stored on its own private servers. Now, data might be stored in multiple servers around the world. It might be gathered through the use of IoT devices embedded in machines that rely on the work of people not employed by the company. For many, this situation creates a tangled legal web with a tendency to default either to past practice or whatever is in the company’s terms of service.
That seems simple enough, but we all know nobody actually takes the time to read, much less understand all the legal niceties of their podcast aggregator before downloading it. They are simply too cumbersome and draconian. Some companies actually make an effort to respect their customers and have terms that reflect that. Whoop for example regards the data generated by people wearing their health tracking devices as belonging to the customer, not the company. Until recently, WhatsApp was in this category. Nevertheless, not enough companies take this approach and are determined to try and claim ownership over the data in its entirety.
TARTLE disagrees. We believe the solution is indeed a simple one – the data rightfully belongs to whoever is generating it. If you think about it this is actually what the default was before we started collecting and storing everything in remote servers. A company kept track of its own data and used it how it saw fit. If a person wanted to know their health information, they tracked it using devices that they paid for but weren’t connected to the internet. It only got complicated because others decided that they should have access to your data, an attitude only feasible because of our constantly being connected. Take that away and everyone’s data is just that, their data. It doesn’t have to be complicated at all. It just needs to be recognized that the default assumption before the cloud was the right one.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Information is the real currency of the present day and likely will be for the future. At least until that meteor gets here. It’s been that way for a long time, actually. Think all the way back to World War Two. Information was the key to the war. Whoever controlled the flow of information, the transmitting of it, the encrypting and decrypting of it, would be sure to be the victor.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:24):
Hey, I'm sitting over here and I realized that it's helpful if I actually have my microphone in front of me to talk.
Jason Rigby (00:31):
Well, Alex.
Alexander McCaig (00:33):
Why are you laughing already? Oh what an idiot I am.
Jason Rigby (00:37):
It is essential in podcasting to have the biggest microphone around.
Alexander McCaig (00:42):
Can we actually triple the size [crosstalk 00:00:43]. Do they have bigger foam pieces or us?
Jason Rigby (00:46):
Yeah, we said. Yeah, go. And in a cool seventies color. Remember when they would shove a mic in your face, and then like prosecuting attorney and [inaudible 00:00:55].
Alexander McCaig (00:54):
It was like some like burnt orange.
Jason Rigby (00:56):
Yeah. Burnt orange. Yeah, that would be perfect.
Alexander McCaig (00:58):
That'd be an awesome, wonderful snow cone we have here in front of us.
Jason Rigby (01:02):
Well, let me ask you something, Alex.
Alexander McCaig (01:04):
Come on. Don't be too personal.
Jason Rigby (01:05):
No, yeah. I won't be too personal since we are live.
Alexander McCaig (01:08):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (01:09):
On most channels all over the world. The value of information.
Alexander McCaig (01:17):
There's no value to it.
Jason Rigby (01:19):
No, but I want us to look back. When we look at history and we'd see how information was processed and how it was communicated.
Alexander McCaig (01:27):
All right. Let's think of a pertinent example. And they made a movie out of this. This is just... Let's talk about how obvious this one is. Remember that enigma machine?
Jason Rigby (01:34):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (01:35):
Come on. That entire function of the war was strictly based there and information and how that information was protected. And that was the deciding factor for whether or not you're going to find a German sub in the water or you're not.
Jason Rigby (01:50):
Or a bomber or... It was interesting. So they were using the enigma machine and Hitler was going to go into Britain. I think this was September 39, around there. And he was going to go into and he's like, "Well, we need to plan to make sure," because they just took over France. And he goes, "How are we going to go in here? What we need to do, we need to just absolutely devastate them with bombers." Because he goes... Because he knew they didn't have a... The United States was shipping tons of aircraft over there.
Alexander McCaig (02:25):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (02:26):
And he was like, we're going to do a surprise and just,` nail London, just hammer them with bombs, which they eventually did that anyways. But these guys, these amazing guys knew that-
Alexander McCaig (02:40):
Were they at Oxford?
Jason Rigby (02:41):
They were listening to it, yes. They were listening to it with that machine and-
Alexander McCaig (02:44):
Mathematicians looking at him, they were trying to see, well, what is it that was repetitive in the process, all the time of each encoded message so they could use it and actually decrease the amount of time and deciphering what the key was. It was an encryption system.
Jason Rigby (02:57):
So you just know the future when you have the information.
Alexander McCaig (03:01):
Yeah. When you have the information, you know the future. You know your future and it tells you how to act because now you're acting with knowledge.
Jason Rigby (03:07):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alexander McCaig (03:08):
Unless someone's encrypting and sending junk messages that are trying to just scare you off. But it could do that. But the point is, when you talk about data and it's importance to history, that saved a lot of lives.
Jason Rigby (03:19):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (03:20):
That's just one example of the infinite amount of examples where data takes the cake in foundationally leading us to a more stable, brighter future.
Jason Rigby (03:30):
Yeah. And we have this article from inside big data called When Big Data Collides with Intellectual Property Law.
Alexander McCaig (03:36):
They're colliding.
Jason Rigby (03:37):
Yeah. So it's not like the [Hedron 00:03:40] -
Alexander McCaig (03:39):
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:03:42] or whatever. I can never pronounce it.
Jason Rigby (03:44):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (03:45):
Hadron?
Jason Rigby (03:45):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (03:46):
Hadron? Hadrian.
Jason Rigby (03:48):
Yeah. However it is, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (03:51):
[Haitis 00:03:51]. Large [Haitis 00:03:52] [crosstalk 00:03:52].
Jason Rigby (03:52):
...everything to do with that. But the world of big data just keeps on turning and tossing up new opportunities, new approaches, the business growth and development. And it hosts a new way of handling the population's vast expanded data maps. And we talked about this.
Alexander McCaig (04:02):
Can you talk into the microphone? You're whispering.
Jason Rigby (04:05):
Am I whispering?
Alexander McCaig (04:06):
Yeah, when you read, it whispers.
Jason Rigby (04:07):
Oh, that's probably because I didn't have it that close.
Alexander McCaig (04:11):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (04:11):
Because I'm drinking coffee, so I don't want to be like [inaudible 00:04:13].
Alexander McCaig (04:15):
And what are those ASMR things?
Jason Rigby (04:17):
Oh, yeah, yeah. Where it's like click, click, click, click, and all that stuff. Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (04:21):
Oh my gosh.
Jason Rigby (04:21):
Yeah. There's some for every... Have you seen the chiropractor? He has a microphone right next to [crosstalk 00:04:27] back.
Alexander McCaig (04:27):
You listen to the back crack a little bit. Oh, I love that.
Jason Rigby (04:31):
Yeah. So yeah. It's cool. He gets millions of views on it. So the realm of intellectual property, when we're looking at the idea of people owning their own data, and this is a proponent and this is why you started TARTLE, Alex.
Alexander McCaig (04:48):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (04:49):
Can we get into a little bit of an explanation of intellectual property and then we'll get into the intellectual property law part of it?
Alexander McCaig (04:57):
Yeah. IP, right? It's a function of time. So it's about time and labor, like most other things. So if I create a widget and I stamp on it, it was made at this [inaudible 00:05:12]. That's essentially my property until I sell it, right? I put the work in.
Jason Rigby (05:17):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (05:18):
And it has some sort of store of value. Now for other intellectual property in the digital domain, like maybe I have a thought and I created some sort of obscure digital thing. Now, I need to make sure that, well, first of all, did I do it before someone else? Maybe I submit a patent on it.
Jason Rigby (05:35):
Yes. Okay.
Alexander McCaig (05:38):
And in doing so, is my name on the patent? Do I share it with multiple people? Does it collide with what maybe other systems have in their system? So when you get into the digital atmosphere of intellectual property, there seems to be a little bit of a bleed. It's like a gray area with a lot of things. Because how do you really define the time of when it was created and how do you define really how it's being used? Which is important when you think about these-
Jason Rigby (06:07):
And the creation of it, and where are the foundations coming from.
Alexander McCaig (06:10):
Right. So in that architecture and the thought of its creation and the time at which that happens, defines the intellectual property belonging to one individual or not, right? Or a group of individuals. And so when we just for a stance here to think about it as an example, with TARTLE, you as an individual are creating that data at a specific time, you are putting in the labor, you have the thoughts that lead to the generation of that thing, that digital thing. And we want to be very clear that there's no bleed between one or the other. It is in fact, yours. Even though that data might've sat on someone else's server, think of it as a widget. It's like you went and you stored it in their server for a bit, but it's still yours.
Alexander McCaig (06:52):
If I go to deposit something at a bank, it's mine. The bank is just safely holding it for me, we're in a safety deposit box. That doesn't mean they own it. Okay? Unless I relinquish claim to it or conceptually give it to them. But that intellectual property belongs to me, that person who's generating that data. And when you talk about big data, it's like they're mixing all of these different pieces of data together are coming from these different servers. And the question is, the way it's being analyzed and what is being analyzed, who actually has the ownership of that?
Jason Rigby (07:26):
Yeah. Because with privacy agreements in everything that we signed and then from there, they're taking... There's four billion people on the internet. So whenever you're taking this mass amounts of data from these people, and then from there, you want to turn around and create a subset, or we always talk about buckets or whatever. And then now, we've got to say, who does this bucket belong to?
Alexander McCaig (07:50):
Right.
Jason Rigby (07:51):
I curated it. These people created it, but I curated it. So do I own it? Or do they own it?
Alexander McCaig (07:57):
And because I put them in that bucket, does that mean now the design of that bucket or the choice to put it in there was that my process?
Jason Rigby (08:04):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (08:04):
And so now you start to define the intellectual property of somebody else.
Jason Rigby (08:08):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (08:09):
What are you talking about? I'm the one... It's mine. What is it for you to decide?
Jason Rigby (08:13):
See, I wouldn't want to make sure... If I was a company, I wouldn't care who the people are and the data that's being created and the people. The process and the algorithm is what I would want to say is mine.
Alexander McCaig (08:22):
Yeah. I was watching a Star Wars Mandalorian.
Jason Rigby (08:26):
I haven't seen it yet. Is it good?
Alexander McCaig (08:27):
It's all right. There wasn't a lot of hype about it. People just like baby Yoda. There's this one scene where this robot, this droid shows up in the earlier episodes and then in one of the later episodes. So this head honcho, the head guy, the Mandalorian guy, the protagonist, shoots this droid in the head. Kills this droid. Then this dude, this kind of rural dude, rebuilds the droid and reprograms him. And so when the Mandalorian comes face to face with the droid again, and he's like, "I don't like the droid. I don't trust him." And the dude who rebuilt him said, "Well, why don't you trust him?" He's like, "Well, he's a bounty hunting droid. He only knows how to kill." He said, "That's not true." He said, "The droids have no feelings or emotions. The droids are only imprinted with the algorithm that we decide as the person on the outside." There's no emotion what it does or any choice, or has any perspective, it's what we are defining as the outside person, imprinting on this machine.
Jason Rigby (09:30):
So it'd be the same with consciousness in our simulation that we live in?
Alexander McCaig (09:34):
Yeah. Yeah. There we go. You opened this up, bro. You're the one that did this so when we look at that with big data, there's subtle nuances with who's imprinting that algorithm, right? If you are that company. And who's the person that is actually feeding the data for that algorithm to actually process? You can have an algorithm, great. But somebody has to give that to you. So those become separate things, not the fact that the data and the algorithm become one, they're separate. Does that make sense? So one person was an intellectual property and the person with the servers and the algorithm owns that.
Jason Rigby (10:13):
Yeah. And the confusion, I think, lies in the issue of the complication of specific data sets. And I'm reading from the article here, they said, "Indeed, while information can still be collated directly, it's more usual for databases to be compiled from automatically harvested information. Gleaned from a wide array of disparate sources, this is after all, part and parcel of the internet as we know it." So when you have... And he goes into talking about IOT devices, and they're taking all this data that's generated by a multitude of devices in real time. Is this better?
Alexander McCaig (10:50):
Yeah. I can hear you.
Jason Rigby (10:51):
Yeah. And used by consu-
Alexander McCaig (10:53):
Hold the damn paper up in front of your face.
Jason Rigby (10:56):
I know I'm reading it like this, like this. When you get old, bro, it's one of those things. Yeah. I can pull it towards... I had moved the mic-
Alexander McCaig (11:04):
Is that better?
Jason Rigby (11:05):
...yesterday. Oh, yes, it is. Is this better?
Alexander McCaig (11:05):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (11:05):
We can knock up my mic too. But whether or not it's the IOT device, or if it's... So I want us to look at this. So you have a [inaudible 00:11:18] right now?
Alexander McCaig (11:19):
Yeah, I do.
Jason Rigby (11:19):
Let's get really practical. You have... The Timex watch isn't an IOT device. [crosstalk 00:11:27].
Alexander McCaig (11:26):
Grandpa.
Jason Rigby (11:27):
Yeah. But those things last forever, and then you have a Dell computer, you're producing data right now. If you're on Google, you're producing data Chrome or whatever. Our board is hooked up to the internet. So I have a [whoop 00:11:42], I have a cell phone, you have an Android phone. I have an Apple phone. And you have a GoPro that's filming this. And we could just go through my whole house and we'd probably find at least 10 or 15 things-
Alexander McCaig (11:56):
Yeah data collecting devices.
Jason Rigby (11:57):
...that's happening right now in this time.
Alexander McCaig (12:01):
This TV's hooked up to the internet.
Jason Rigby (12:03):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (12:03):
That other TV.
Jason Rigby (12:05):
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (12:06):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (12:06):
There's three TVs in this place.
Alexander McCaig (12:08):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (12:09):
So all three of those are... Think about it. So that amount of data that I'm creating, who owns it? TARTLE would say, "We own it."
Alexander McCaig (12:21):
Yeah TARTLE... Because listen-
Jason Rigby (12:22):
But is [whoop 00:12:24] saying, "I own the data because he bought the device for me and signed the privacy agreement."
Alexander McCaig (12:27):
No, actually, I talked to them.
Jason Rigby (12:28):
They think you on your data.
Alexander McCaig (12:30):
I'm just saying, as an example.
Jason Rigby (12:31):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (12:32):
But for the TV, I don't know what's going on with a Roku.
Jason Rigby (12:36):
Yeah. Roku's collecting-
Alexander McCaig (12:37):
For our podcast publishing services, it's on their servers, but we recorded it.
Jason Rigby (12:43):
Yeah. [Lipson 00:12:44]-
Alexander McCaig (12:44):
What if we have copyright on it? But who owns the intellectual property of that data sitting on the server? Not the copyright of it, but just data in general. It's like-
Jason Rigby (12:54):
That's interesting, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (12:55):
It's an interesting fact. And so, when we look at it in this philosophical [crosstalk 00:12:58]-
Jason Rigby (12:58):
Really tough in the music industry. If you released on SoundCloud or something?
Alexander McCaig (13:02):
Correct. Wait, we are on SoundCloud.
Jason Rigby (13:04):
Yeah. But I mean, if you released a song and that song went super viral. Now, attorneys are going to get involved.
Alexander McCaig (13:11):
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:13:12].
Jason Rigby (13:12):
I'm pretty sure this has happened.
Alexander McCaig (13:13):
Only when it's viral. Oh. It seems like you use three of these notes, which are also used in a Queen song back in the seventies or eighties.
Jason Rigby (13:18):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Alexander McCaig (13:19):
Like whatever, it's a chord progression. Get off my back.
Jason Rigby (13:22):
So once again, what we're seeing with this... And I want you to clarify this once again, what we're seeing with this is in this new world that we're entering in, this new VR set that we're putting on, we're having these questions come up that we have to answer.
Alexander McCaig (13:38):
Yeah, because there's like cross pollination now.
Jason Rigby (13:42):
And decentralization. So here's my question that I want to propose to you and we'll close in this one. The way that we answer the question is going to be the way that our future is shaped for the most important time in history for amplification of technology.
Alexander McCaig (14:00):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (14:01):
And if we take it... If these attorneys and these big data companies take it and say, and they're only thinking about monetization, what does that do for humanity?
Alexander McCaig (14:12):
I'll talk about that as an example. So I was speaking with my attorneys yesterday, [inaudible 00:14:17] bad for them. I had a question around intellectual property and the mindset with them is money. How do we prosecute for an issue of like economic gain or loss? And the question was, he was like, "Well, where do the servers sit?" And I said, "Well, they sit all over the world." We supposed to do with decentralized. And the they were all like, "Wait a minute." And they're trying to figure it out because there's a difference in the change of the mindset. Because if the system is supported by the public, but the server's sitting in one specific area, where does the jurisdiction actually lie? And so, if you have split jurisdictions across 200 plus countries, how do you prosecute on intellectual property then if it's being stored in servers all over the place? So the initial thought was that you own it if it sits in your server here in a domestic area, that's where you would prosecute on it. But now things are becoming inherently decentralized.
Jason Rigby (15:18):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (15:19):
So from an economic standpoint, it's like, well, it's not so black and white anymore.
Jason Rigby (15:23):
No.
Alexander McCaig (15:23):
There's so much bleed. There's some, like I said, cross pollination, it becomes a huge gray area. So I thought that was frankly interesting. I don't know what the outcome is going to be, but just considering that. And so when you think about it, if that's the issue, if [inaudible 00:15:37] of servers, then we have to go even deeper. You have to then go to the individual person or company that is actually generating that data. Because if the server has been the defining factor, but service have now become decentralized, you can't rely on that anymore.
Jason Rigby (15:52):
Mm-mm (negative).
Alexander McCaig (15:52):
It's no longer black and white. So you're going to have to take a whole new step down to that primary foundational level and figure out who is the actual progenitor of that data. What is the provenance from server to cell phone to actually thought from the human being? That's where it sits. And so when we designed TARTLE, we thought about it. It's like that intellectual property belongs to that person. It has to, especially when we view the world and it's inherently becoming more decentralized, that means you have to have your own empowerment, your own self responsibility over this thing. Because if you want the value from it, if you want the intellectual property over that data, you have to be responsible for its management, not pass off that responsibility to someone else's management on some server somewhere so that they can say, "Well, maybe we own it."
Jason Rigby (16:36):
No, I think that's beautiful. And I think it's just a reaction to change. And so whenever you're reacting, you go into this protective, bubble.
Alexander McCaig (16:49):
[inaudible 00:16:49].
Jason Rigby (16:49):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (16:52):
Oh, snap.
Jason Rigby (16:54):
Oh, what do we do with Blockchain? I have no idea. What we do [crosstalk 00:16:57].
Alexander McCaig (16:58):
We're losing power.
Jason Rigby (16:58):
What do we do with Reddit when they're making our shorts go-
Alexander McCaig (17:03):
Politics are falling apart. The financial scams are crippling people that have been running the business for too long.
Jason Rigby (17:11):
Oh, this is funny. Okay, well we better be done.
Alexander McCaig (17:14):
Yeah. I don't think we need to go into that anymore.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
