> You argued that gathering of data signals ownership of it. But I don’t know that reasonable people would agree that that’s about framing.

First of, I am a very reasonable person so you already have one. Second of, even in our sick information economy, public data can be owned when gathered in a database by a third party. The company that created the database can sell access to it and go after people that re-publish the database. Even though it consists 100% of public and free data.

> If you’re going to argue data ownership at all, it seems to me the creator of the data is the owner, unless transfer ownership to another person or to the public domain.

If you go by what's natural, instead of by "please, institutionally protect my obsoleted business model", the creator has the sole ownership of the data until he transfers the data to someone else. If he made a copy and gave it to someone, now they both have the ownership. If he just gave away the data now there's a new single owner of the data. Then IP ownership would work just like ownership of every other actual thing in the universe.

> On the other hand, I can understand a stand that data can never be “owned”, but I don’t think you are saying that.

Oh, it definitely can be owned. I own all zeroes and ones on the computer that I own. Please don't steal them and don't tell me what I can do with them.