Notes while reading Molly White’s article ‘We need to talk about digital ownership’.
White observes that this topic can be hard to pin down in discussion because people are talking about many different things. She frames things in terms of the rights involved.
As a consumer
What happens exactly when you buy a digital item - what ownership have you gained? You don’t generally get a file any more.
Various rhetorical questions throughout the article prod at the nature of digital ownership that we seem to have come to accept.
- Is it still ownership if you buy a song but you can’t listen to it?
- Do you “own” a piece of media if it can disappear at any time? Or if you can only watch it sometimes, under certain conditions?
- But, Amazon’s terms and conditions disclaim that content I purchase “may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons”.1b Do I own this media, or am I just renting it indefinitely?
- They might listen to music all day long, but do they own any songs at all?
- Is it ownership if the game you own intermittently can’t be played, or eventually might be unplayable completely?
- Do you own something if you can’t resell it?
In conclusion, we identify that “for consumers, rights encompassed by ownership include ongoing access, availability, and resale rights”.
As a creator
What does ownership mean if you’re the person making media? I use the term “media” very broadly here: I’m speaking about anything from career musicians writing and recording songs all the way to a random guy typing out and sending a tweet.
This quote jumps out at me because of how it chimes with the more expansive definition used in Local-first Software, which in turn had resonated with the ‘hacker’ class concept that Mackenzie Wark proposes in Capital is Dead. This might be a topic to extract into a separate note.
Here Molly asks the following questions to probe at the underlying concept.
- Do you own your work if you can’t do with it whatever you like? Do you own your content if other people use it for other purposes, potentially including purposes you don’t anticipate, aren’t aware of, or don’t like?
- Do those creators own what they’ve created if they can’t sell it?
- (Accessbility, although not certain this is the right term) Do creators own what they’ve created if they can no longer access it?
- (Portability) Do you own your work if you can’t take it with you somewhere else? Or if it’s very difficult to do so?