Invoice for stats on [email protected]

I just bid farewell to the last of my Netflix DVDs, Perfect Blue and Derzu Uzalu. I got both of them back in May and hadn’t gotten around to watching them till now. Tivo has basically killed my need for Netflix, as well as Netflix’s own lack of selection. I cancelled my account with Netflix this month. I had been with them since October of 1999. I only stayed with them as long as I did out of nostalgia. That’s not what I’ve been thinking about though.

I rented 200 movies and rated almost 800 movies. What intrigues me is all of that marketing data I created about myself is now gone. Who owns that data? Should I send an invoice to Netflix asking them to compensate me for all that information? Or does Netflix own that data since I used their tools to create? If so would that be like Stanley saying they own part of a house if someone used a Stanley hammer? Is marketing data only useful in the aggregate, or can one individuals marketing data be valuable? What happens if that data is worth more to me than Netflix, or vice versa? Sheesh, even the way the data is formatted can add value. If they send me a nice XML file that’s worth more to me than a Word document telling me what I rented.

Just wondering out loud…