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Control and Benefit Are Morally Owed to the Source
Richard A. Wright
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Reframing the Issues
- 3. The “High Cost to Industry” Defense
- 3.1 Raw Materials as a Cost of Doing Business
- 3.2 The Cost of Correcting Past Inequities as a Cost of Doing Business
- 3.3 Originator Control of Materials as a Feature of Doing Business
- 4. The “Private” is “Public” Defense
- 4.1 Private Information and “Voluntary” Release
- 4.2 Private Information in the “Public” Domain
- 4.3 Autonomy as the Basis for Understanding Privacy
- 5. Toward a Resolution
- 6. Concluding Thoughts
Private Information in the “Public” Domain
The second mitigating circumstance, the “public”
record, is much harder to attack, requiring at least in part philosophical
arguments concerning the nature of personhood. However, it is possible
to make several suggestions which throw serious doubt on the industry’s
claims to unlimited access.
To begin, when information appears in a governmental domain which is not
by law legally defined as confidential, the industry reads “government”
as “public,” and deems its access and use of the information
to be appropriate. Just because the residing place of information is governmental,
however, it does not follow that the information may be taken from that
place and used privately, for commercial purposes. To do so is to confuse
utilization with access. The earlier example of unlocked oil storage is
an appropriate consideration here; the unlocked gate does not authorize
the taking of oil, regardless of whether it is subsequently sold or used
personally.
Another example is a patient’s hospital medical record. There has
been repeated legal verification of the conceptual distinction between
record and information; the record may belong to the hospital, but the
information the record contains belongs to the patient. In the current
consideration, the record may be “public” in the sense that
it belongs to a government agency, but the information in that record
still belongs to the individual. Moreover, the privacy of medical records
has been repeatedly upheld, even for “public” hospitals. Since
there is extensive common information in both types of record, there appears
to be no grounds for automatic exemption of the information industry from
the commonly accepted standards of privacy.
Yet another example is personal. Our local newspaper publishes a special
listing, in its Saturday edition, of the owner’s name and address
for every house sold with a sale value over a specific amount. My wife
and I did not realize this until we bought our house, and could not figure
out how all our coworkers knew exactly what we paid for the house. We
asked how they knew and they told us. When questioned about this, the
newspaper’s only response was “The information is a matter of
public record, thus we may legitimately use it however we see fit.”
I was never able to get a justification for the publication, however,
only a continuous reassertion of the public nature of the information.
Importantly, there were immediate results from the publication. Solicitations
by phone and mail increased phenomenally. For weeks, not a single dinner
hour went by without at least one call, frequently several. One would
think word was out that despite the house’s price, it was infested
with every known vermin, minus windows, studs open to the weather, missing
roof, no heat or air conditioning, faulty wiring, unlandscaped yard, etc.
At least some solicitors, including accountants, insurance agents, car
dealers, investment advisers, and merchants of all sorts, chose the mail,
of which there was often so much the mail carrier had to strap the excess
to the outside of the box!
The point of these examples is to question the industry claim that information
is “public” on the grounds that it misconstrues the nature of
records by confusing the physical record and the information it contains.
Moreover, it is to suggest that the utilization of such information is
far from benign for the original source. On both counts, a case can be
made either for not allowing use of the information or, if used, compensating
the original source.
Go to: 4.3 Autonomy as the Basis for Understanding Privacy
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