Can information be owned?

This is a real question, and if there are lawyers or others out there who know the answer, please post a comment or suggest some readings.

It seems to me that under U.S. law, no one owns information.

You can own a book. Some books are worth tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to collectors, and they are legally protected n the same way as any valuable physical property. However, the owner of the book does not own the information contained in that physical object.

Copyright explicitly protects the expression or organization of information, not the information expressed or organised. Indeed, if I understand copyright law correctly, a copyright grants the holder the monopoly right to exploit the expression or organization, rather than ownership of the information per se.

Patents and similar instruments, similarly grant the right to exclude others from exploitation of inventions for limited periods of time, but do so on the condition that the information per se is made available to the public. Indeed, the purpose of establishing patent rights under law is to trade the monopolistic exploitation rights for publication of the information, in order that others might take the ideas from the patent and extend and expand them.

Trade secrets are protected from being stolen, but I don’t think the protection extends to ownership of the information per se. Thus if you hold the recipe for a wonderful food product as a trade secret, you are protected against a competitor surreptitionsly buying the recipe from one of your employees and using it in his own product. However, you are not protected from that competitor creating his own recipe for a food indistinguishable from yours and marketing that food. Trade secrecy limits the ways of acquiring information, but not the fundamental right to generate or otherwise legally acquire the information held as trade secret.

Similarly, contract law allows non-disclosure contracts and clauses in which one party to the contract agrees (in return for some benefit) not to disclose certain information. But I would assume that such contracts do not establish any ownership rights to the information involved. Rather they simply formalize the renunciation of the rights of one of the parties to the contract to disseminate that information.

The U.S. government has the right to classify information for national security reasons. This seems again to be a right of government to restrict some people from disseminating that information, and indeed it seems limited to people working directly or indirectly for the government, who in general will have surrendered any right to disseminate such information when granted a clearance.

Anti-spying laws would seem also to limit the ways in which people can acquire information, not imply ownership of that information.

As I understand it, some governments have “state secrets acts” which prohibit any citizen or resident of their country from disclosing information designated as a state secret. But again, this seems a lesser right than would be implied by government ownership of that information. I think it is being debated now whether the U.S. government has the right to exclude the publication of classified information by the media, or whether is should be given such a right; the case of the Pentagon Papers would seem to indicate that the government does not have such a right.

The First Amendment to the U.S. constitution prohibits the government from impinging on the freedom of speech for any and all U.S. citizens. This would seem to allow a citizen the right to communicate any information he/she chooses to the world (unless he/she has contractually accepted a limitation on that free speech). I think this implies that the government can not own a piece of information in the sense of owning a piece of land. It can not exclude others from the right to use or communicate that information.

Certainly one often pays to obtain information. One buys a newspaper or a consultation with a physician, but I think the payment in these cases is made for a good or a service, and the information content comes free in the bundle.

So is it really true that there is no right to own information? If so, is that just U.S. law, or is that common among nations?