The content of this book is rather controversial. It paints a rather bleak picture, that the current EU legal economic system being developed for the data-driven economy is both outdated and – to some extent – a policy at war with itself. It promotes dominant platforms to detriment of others. Moreover, the fundamentals for creating rules are also missing. A liberal economic system needs to be based on aspects of a rights system, otherwise, we risk losing innovation, the establishment of new markets, and the creation of wealth, while we will see increasing market failures. Without a legal system for rights to data, we will lose out of a just system for the distribution of wealth. Indeed, it is time that the data-driven economy and the internet economy are granted their ‘property’ rights, reflecting the new paradigm of the data-driven industrial revolution. Moreover, such a regime fits well with the European economic constitution now being established.

Data is vital to the internet-based economy and will become even more important in the old economy as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains ground. The competitiveness of firms will increasingly depend on timely access to relevant data and the ability to use that data to develop new, innovative applications and products. In consumer-oriented businesses, the relevant data is often personal information; although this data is becoming increasingly collectable, only a few firms have access to larger amounts of it.1

This book chapter advances a hypothesis that judges tend to avoid ex post inefficiency (that is, inefficiency falling to litigants), but judges are less inclined to avoid ex ante inefficiency (that is, inefficiency incurred by future parties). Drawing on three empirical studies which the author has conducted on property cases rendered by courts in Taiwan, this chapter presents preliminary evidence to test this hypothesis. The three studies are consistent with the hypothesis, as judges avoid ex post inefficiency in two studies (co-ownership partition and building encroachment) but fail to avoid ex ante inefficiency in one study (trespass to land).

This chapter explored the idea of leveraging property rights to enable either better decision making by stakeholders, usually by changing the ex ante information and incentives, or by re-allocating rights as originally suggested by Coase. We explored Hardin’s (in)famous ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ from the economic perspectives of rivalry (aka subtractability) and excludability. We explored the impacts of observing the three states of rivalrous, non-rivalrous, and anti-rivalrous against both excludable and non-excludable, yielding six types of goods or services. Traditional property concepts, such as rules of first capture or first mover, could lead to inefficient use of resources. Demsetz's theory is that property rights could emerge, sua sponte, internalising externalities that follow from open access; that property rights enable communities to re-balance the impacts of Pigou’s externalities. Demsetz’s theory does not necessarily imply the establishment of private property rights. Again, the issues of rivalry and excludability came into view. Cooter and Ulen advocated that if property rights could be granted for various natural resources, including wildlife, it would benefit the efforts to protect and conserve those resources.