Data Property Rights

The paper project applies the economic theory of property rights (following the seminal papers of Ronald Coase: The Problem of Social Cost; JLE 1960, and Guido Calabresi/Douglas Melamed: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral; HLR 1972) to the question who should own data. The property rights view differs fundamentally from the lawyers' view, which often draws on a variant of the "producer principle": While using an autonomous car, the user is said to "produce" data and, therefore, is entitled to the ownership of this data.
The economic theory of property rights demands for all resources (including property rights) to be in the hands of those actors who values them highest. According to the Coase theorem, the initial allocation of property rights only influences efficiency if transaction cost (or transferring property rights) are positive.
In a positive transaction cost scenario, a property right allocation should be enforced by a liability rule. According to Calabresi/Melamed, under a liability rule the non-owner of a property right is in fact allowed to capture it at will, but then had to compensate the owner.
An efficient property right allocation and enforcement could be achieved by the following idea: Give the property right to the party whose valuation can be determined by a judge; protect it by a liability rule, and oblige the other party to pay this valuation as damages if this party wants to exercise the property right. Applied to the data problem: The party which, according to this system, should be endowed with the property right initially , is not necessarily the party that "produces" the data. If the other side's valuation can be determined by a judge, it is this side (and not the "producer" of the data) who shoudl be endowed with the property right.