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A recent push in the IT industry to collect and monetize big data is headed for a clash with privacy concerns from Internet users and potential regulation from some governments, according to tech analyst firm Ovum.

Internet advertising networks and other companies that depend on the collection of personal data online should prepare for a "rebalancing" of the relationship between themselves and Web users, with Web users having more control of their data, said Mark Little, principal analyst at the U.K. tech and business analysis firm. Web users are becoming more aware of privacy tools and appear ready to use them, Little said. "More and more consumers are deciding to effectively become invisible in data terms on the Internet," he added. "It will shake the Internet economy as more and more users decide they don't want to be tracked."

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Intellectual Property System developed and published a set of digital copyright principles that we hope will provide a framework for addressing copyright in light of the many new technologies for creating, disseminating, and consuming content.

1. Creators and producers of creative works should receive meaningful protection, recognition and compensation for their contributions to economic and cultural development.
2. Copyright law should reflect an appropriate balance between the rights of creators and copyright owners and the interests of consumers and other users of works.
3. Copyright law should be regularly reviewed and updated as appropriate to respond to new technologies and uses.
4. Copyright systems should enable rights to be meaningfully, practically, cost-effectively, and proportionally enforced.
5. A wide range of means should be available for creative works to reach the public, as enabled by Internet and other technologies -- maximizing choice for both rights holders and users. It is desirable to have as much quality content as possible available in as many formats as possible.
6. Licensing should be streamlined in a content-appropriate manner and simplified to be as easy and efficient as possible, including for different types of content and across national boundaries.
7. The public should be educated about the purpose, scope and nature of copyright protections, including exceptions, and the reasons for proposed changes or government action.

Congress enacted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1984, before there was a World Wide Web. And yet, it took Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz’s apparent suicide for efforts to reform it to get traction. Sometimes to make a law, it takes a martyr.

Swartz died in the midst of a controversial trial. In 2010, he downloaded millions of academic papers from the JSTOR database. For him, this was likely a political act. He believed all journal information should be free. Federal prosecutors in Boston thought otherwise. Even though JSTOR didn't pursue legal action against Swartz, the text of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) allowed for criminal charges. Swartz's allies argued that the criminal proceedings didn't fit the crime, saying federal prosecutors were trying to make an example of him. The word "persecution" — not "prosecution" — often appears in discussions of what happened. He was facing up to 35 years in prison. However, it was more likely that he would serve less than a year in a minimum-security setting. His allies argue that this is what led Swartz to take his own life. Now, in death, his accomplishments, coupled with his connections in Washington, are galvanizing to establish a law—“Aaron’s Law”— that would exonerate him.

Maps have always had a way of bluntly illustrating power. Simply appearing on one can be enough to make a place or community matter. Meanwhile, absence from "the map" conveys something quite the opposite.

Recall 19th century colonial surveys of Africa with the continent’s vast interior labeled as “unknown.” That one word on unmapped territory was simply another way of saying – in the eyes of the mapmaker – that the region was of little consequence. Whoever lived there didn't matter. This old idea of paper maps as power brokers offers a good analogy for how we might think today about the increasingly complex maps of digital information on the physical world that exist in the "geoweb." This is where Wikipedia pages and online restaurant reviews and geocoded tweets live, all theoretically floating atop the actual cities and neighborhoods they describe. "In many ways, it’s not even an analogy," says Mark Graham, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute. "We actually are talking about maps of some sort, in a way. Just because they’re maybe more ephemeral, or maybe more invisibly layered over our cities, it doesn’t mean they’re any less important or any less real." On these maps of digital information, a familiar trend is emerging. Some places are covered much more densely with information than others (Manhattan compared to upstate New York, Europe compared to Africa). But that information density bears no direct relationship to the density of human populations. And the gap between these two metrics provides a new way of looking at old questions of inequality.