The opening chapter then remarks that, ironically, in a dispute with a publisher, Amazon recently deleted versions of 1984 on Kindle and sent refunds to their purchasers. While with printed books, a bookstore cannot enter your home and erase your bookshelves, in a digital world they can, because a digital copy is not necessarily owned in the same way a printed copy of a book is owned like other possessions in your life. "The 1984 incident is hardly the only case of readers losing access to their purchases."
This timely work demonstrates that our rights in media goods are unstable and insecure. While we experience convenience through digital downloads and cloud storage, to name only a few services, we give up other forms of control on a level that must be held to the light. Their are benefits in digital technologies. Where people have suffered in the past and lost irreplacable work, the impossible backup is now acheivable. We now have a choice between permanent ownership and possibly temporary access, an arrangement which could in some ways can help us better organize our ideas. Here the authors set out gallantly to examine and address the consequences. So we have had a social shift from ownership to licensing. We can't resell something we don't own. But what if it is your own intellectual forays or your own copywritten work? Again evoking shades of Orwell, the book asks: Who owns you? Surveillance of consumer behaviour today also means purchases of previously banned material can be tracked as they were never before. How is our privacy being reframed? It was not possible in the past to track banned books moving through a used bookstore. Are we not now forgoing essential human rights?
The book posits that digital economy has indeed created a tectonic shift in our society, as the concept of property ownership itself is changing and has become more nuanced. The exclusion of other individuals from the sharing of a land, a mineral rights to land and so on has always been a theme amongst thinkers examining the rights of the worker. So I found it interesting that on page 22, the authors evoke John Locke who defined property as "a natural right that arises from labor." Hegel makes an appearance as well, remarking that property "is necessary for individual self-actualization. Unless we can exert control over objects of the world, we cannot express our will, achieve our goal, or thrive as individuals."
The next chapters then wade deeply into the murky waters of copyright and it does so fairly impressively. Describing many famous recent disputes in the realm of "copies, clouds and streams" the authors help us see just how vast the amount of fine print consumers are not reading really is. One of the more famous of these, remarks the authors, was "when Google initially released its Chrome browser, the license read in part, "you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on and through (Googles products, software services and web sites.)" Such a license would mean Google could publish every email you send, every photo you share, and every password you had ever entered using Chrome. Only after considerable outcry did Google update the license to clarify that users "retain copyright to the content they generate."
This is a thorough and timely book. I'm so glad I'm giving it a read. After versing its readers in the stories behind these famous and culture-shaking digital cases, the authors even tackle the "promise and perils of digital libraries." Explored among other questions is the idea of "libraries without collections" and a chapter later, "the internet of things you don't own." Then, with possibly the eeriest example in the book, chapter 8 describes the Mattel 'Hello Barbie' talking doll through ToyTalk app, a cloud based service with fine print that reveals their toy "transcribes and stores...recordings and speech data...including your voice and likeness as captured therein, to provide and maintain the ToyTalk app, to develop tune enhance or improve speech recognition..." In other words, the authors conclude, everything you may say to Barbie can and will be recorded for all time.
The authors conclude on a positive note, but emphasize that personal vigilance must always be switched to "on" in the digital world, while legally defining ownership applicable to digital goods is "a task that can't be put off any longer." They also remark, we should be alert to the moments when "everyday objects are being replaced or supplemented by information," as this digital economy hold great promise but also great risks. Essentially the book is a well-crafted wake up call designed to verse us in the history of progress acheived in the past around labour and personal property, so that as we enter an era celebrated for its freeing convenience, interconnectivty and availability of information, we are not mindlessly underestimating the value of ownership as, in any society, "the loss of ownership puts us all at risk of exploitation."
Perzanowski, A., & Schultz, J. (2018). The end of ownership personal property in the Digital Economy. The MIT Press.
