New Property Laws in The EU from Us
- James Felton Keith
- Sep 29
- 2 min read
This week, I was honored with the MyData Global Thought Leader Award in Helsinki, Finland for my work and advocacy in Europe on legally turning your personal data into property. I also told OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s parents—whom I met the previous week in D.C. at the Whistleblowers of America conference—that I would honor him. It was also my birthday, and I couldn’t help but think that he would never have another birthday.
Two game-changing things happened for our campaign last week.
The European Union's first country created Property Rights for People over their 1) Voice, 2) Face, 3) Bodies, and will open up class-action–style litigation in the EU via the A.I. Act. This has never been possible in Europe in the way it has been in the United States.
I demonstrated math from the Data Is Labor book, referenced by Suchir Balaji, that calculates how much money people are owed from companies that use our data to fuel their technology.
My advisors think that posting an equation is too nerdy, but unlike our conservative counterparts, our people will ask the extra question, and I want you to know that I've got the answer, if you are willing to take your equity back. That's what we owe us!
I spent the week with policymakers and military veterans who aren’t just thinking about tech rights but also about solutions to widen the “big tent” of our leftist politics in order to fight the very real threat of an emboldened Russia crossing the border. If you are not familiar, Finland has the longest and most militarized border with Russia. We don’t all agree about the execution of our politics, but we are all aligned on the root cause of our 21st-century division: it is rooted in how algorithms differentiate our mutual interests and bait us against each other.
Why Does This Matter?
We know this is how we turn tech like AI in to the new Labor Movement, if we follow these steps:
Create a new property that may be distributed across classes of people
Give the people ownership of this property and tie ownership to their lives
Organize labor unions to expand collective bargaining and balance (increase) incomes.
It's necessary to note that the new laws that Europeans have are laws that I and a global cohort of early thinkers on tech ethics have been asking them to produce for nearly 2 decades. In the video below I detail my 2017 talks with The Nordics and Eastern Europeans to create data ownership rights. They didn't like it back then, but we didn't know the threat of AI or Trump. Join me this Thursday October 2nd to do a deep dive on this topic at Columbia University in Harlem.
Learn more about how we argue for our collective equity through data rights, and how it can be the great unifier of the working class in the Data Is Labor book.
Long story short. This campaign is creating new property for people, and helping them bargain either collectively or individually for their value that is trapped in companies across the globe. We can scale the Union Movement together!
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