"Should Google compensate us for our searches?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-owns-the-future-by-jaron-lanier/2013/05/03/400f8fb0-ab6d-11e2-b6fd-ba6f5f26d70e_print.html

Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

By Evgeny Morozov, Published: May 3

Should Google compensate us for our searches? Should Amazon pay us for the books we buy? They should, because they are using us to expand their databases and hone their algorithms — and, eventually, steal our jobs. This is the startling argument advanced by Jaron Lanier in “Who Owns the Future?,” his eccentric but unconvincing meditation on how the middle classes could survive the menace of digitization.

In Lanier’s utopia, the data we divulge to what he dubs the “Siren Servers” — the likes of Google and Amazon — would earn us “royalties based on creative contributions from a whole lifetime.” We must seize the initiative to make this happen or prepare for “an eventual socialist backlash.”