The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy

Authors

Aaron Perzanowski, University of Michigan Law SchoolFollow
Jason Schultz, New York University School of LawFollow

Files

Description

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn't. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.

Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

ISBN

9780262335959

Publication Date

2016

Publisher

MIT Press

City

Cambridge, MA

Keywords

personal property rights, copyright law, ebook vendors, ownership, cloud storage, streaming, digital goods, end user agreements, digital marketplace

Disciplines

Intellectual Property Law | Internet Law | Property Law and Real Estate

Comments

Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.

© 2016 MIT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Perzanowski, Aaron and Jason Schultz. The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10524.001.0001 (Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.)