On the ownership of data...............

We have had thousands of years of experience in regulation the ownership of land.  We know how to build a fence around a field, place a guard at the gate, and control who can go in.  Over the past two centuries we have become extremely sophisticated in regulating the ownership of industry; thus today I can own a piece of General Motors and a bit of Toyota by buying their shares.  But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want.
     So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers, and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum:  how do you regulate the ownership of data?  This may be the most important political question of our era.  If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse.  People are already sensing the coming cataclysm.  Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century