Legal Commentary

First, I'd like to thank Dan and the rest of the Prawfs gang for inviting me to guest blog here - it is truly an honor. My posts are usually relegated to a blog with a much smaller following that I run with co-editor Andy Whitford. As Dan noted I am a professor of political science at Binghamton University. However, before I went to graduate school and began my second career as a social scientist, I was an attorney. It is this intersection of law and social science that has always intrigued me and my question for this post has a lot to do with both topics. 

In conducting social science research I perform a lot, and I mean a lot, of data collection and coding. This is a process that is annoyingly both mundane and challenging (at least at times). Since most of you have at least some experience with this process I will not bore you with the challenges and pitfalls of performing quality data collection and coding. What I do want to stress though is that it is work. It requires time, expertise (this varies of course by context), and effort (i.e. it's not fun). Finally, this work adds value. 

In political science there are very strong professional mores to share data with other researchers. In fact, it is usually expected immediately after publication of your first article using the data if not before that time (e.g. after presenting a working paper at a conference). I profess some ignorance of the social mores on data sharing in empirical legal studies, but from my few conversations on this point, I think that they might be somewhat different. In political science this norm of sharing your data is usually rationalized along the lines of "don't you want to aid the pursuit of knowledge?" or "surely you support the advancement of science, right?" or similar call to a higher good. Now, don't get me wrong, I have asked people for data and they have shared it with me (and vice versa) - this process is all fine and good. But isn't this generalized rationalization a bit simplistic? If people begin losing incentives to spend significant time collecting data, then doesn't that inhibit the pursuit of knowledge? It seems that within this norm there is a tacit winner (data analyzers) and an implicit, well, loser-chump (data collectors). Isn't a more nuanced discussion in order? Can't we find some way to satisfactorily compensate/protect data collection efforts? I'd be very interested to hear what intellectual property scholars think about this situation. Okay, a few observations to clarify my discussion here:

- Of course, I am not talking about data collected with the help or aid of a funding entity such as the National Science Foundation - clearly such data should be shared and my understanding is that it is part of the grant agreement. 

- I am also not talking about a situation in which a researcher has access to information that other researchers do not have. The usual situation is publicly available data that has been collected, organized, and put into a spreadsheet - all with some toil and sweat. 

- I am not suggesting that data be kept forever - just that we might think about a protection period or establishing guidelines that adequately compensates the investment of time that data collection warrants and perhaps that we have some uniformity in the process and an enforcement mechanism.

- Re the duty to further the pursuit of knowledge - aren't there competing duties to the entities providing the opportunity to collect the data. I'm wondering if your university pays you summer money to collect data (or for a research assistant to do so), then doesn't the institution have a proprietary interest in that data and shouldn't it be compensated when the effort it funded is used? Isn't this what happens when science professors get patents on things they discover or develop on university funded projects? It is my understanding that the entities producing Pacer and Trac data charge users for their products.

- One defense of requiring "quick" data sharing is that we must do this to make sure that the researcher has competently collected and analyzed the data. Really? I'm pretty sure that a journal editor could require that authors submit data for peer review with an agreement that the person performing the robustness/accuracy testing does not publish with the data or release it - simple enough. 

- Another defense is that data collectors are adequately compensated by the social capital and/or citations (acclaim) that they receive by making their data available to other researchers - curiously, we don't apply this rationale (at least to the same degree) to music, writing, trademarks, or product design.

I'll shut up for now, but I would be interested in hearing other peoples' thoughts on these matters. As I said before, I've been on both sides of the data sharing situation, so I actually have somewhat mixed feelings on the subject. It just seems to me that this is a very under explored area of IP, especially given the increase in the importance of data driven processes in recent years in the private sector. A (very) brief search on Lexis revealed some law review articles on data and IP, but not as many as I had expected. 

Jeff