Every piece of content has a creator and owner (in this post, I will assume they are by default the same entity). I do not mean ownership in the traditional sense of, e.g., stashing a piece of paper in a drawer, but in the metaphysical sense that each artifact is forever associated with one or more “creators.”

This is certainly true of the end-products of intellectual labor, such as the article you are reading. However, it is also true of more mundane things, such as checkbook register entries or credit card activity. Whenever you pay a bill or purchase an item, you implicitly “create” a piece of content: the associated entry in your statement.  This has two immediately identifiable “creators”: the payer (you) and the payee.  The same is true for, e.g., your email, your IM chats, your web searches, etc. Interesting tidbit: over 20% of search terms entered daily in Google are new, which would imply roughly 20 million new pieces of content per day, or over 7 billion (over twice the earth’s population) per year—all this from just one activity on one website.

When I spend a few weeks working on, say, a research paper, I have certain expectations and demands about my rights as a “creator.” However, I give almost no thought to my rights on the trail of droppings (digital or otherwise) that I “create” each day, by searching the web, filling up the gas tank, getting coffee, going through a toll booth, swiping my badge, and so on.  However, with the increasing ease of data collection and distribution in digital form, we should re-think our attitudes towards “authorship”.

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