What we hold in common: from legal personality to European data commons

When juxtaposed with my own research the more recent writings of Serge Gutwirth are in their content and themes both familiar and radically surprising. I illustrate this with two legal questions from my own recent work. First, if granting legal personhood to non-humans, more specifically AI systems and natural entities (rivers, trees, etc.), makes any sense. Secondly, how to conceptually and legally analyze what is happening now that the EU is in the process of creating sectoral Common European Data Spaces plus general infrastructures to facilitate data-sharing in the EU. With regard to both legal questions, juxtaposing them with Serge’s recent writings on legal personality and the commons has challenged me to think more profoundly. Before I dive into these legal questions of personhood (section 2) and European sectoral common data spaces (section 4), I first give some basic socio-philosophical pointers about how multiplicity can be brought together under a common denominator in a semiotic togetherness (section 1) and how sometimes a particular “physical” togetherness is required to avoid overuse of resources, that is, a self-organization called “commoning” (section 3). The legal and the socio-philosophical are then related: in section 2 I relate semiotic togetherness to legal personhood, in section 4 I explore the potential relations between commoning and the European data spaces. Finally, in section 5, all parts come together in the question if there are data commons that both build on a specific form of “physical” self-organized togetherness (that is, commoning), as well as on the semiotic togetherness of legal personhood.