mine ebooklet vs1 - minethebook.com

10
Adapted from Mine!

Transcript of mine ebooklet vs1 - minethebook.com

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Adaptedfrom

Mine!

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

How much of our digital media do we actually own?

Like millions of consumers, Anders G. da Silva buys movies through his Apple iTunes account. To his surprise one day, he found that three movies he’d bought had disappeared from his account. He contacted Apple, looking for an explanation. He didn’t like the customer service agent’s answer, so he tweeted a dramatized version of his unsatisfying exchange—which promptly went viral. As he wrote:

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

Book-burning has entered the digital age.

Linn Nygaard felt the same frustration as Anders G. da Silva, but with Amazon instead of Apple. An information technology consultant based in Oslo, Nygaard is often on the road. In England on a trip, she got a Kindle. It worked great. Over time she bought forty books. Lots to read on a conveniently compact screen. One morning, though, she found her account blocked. Even worse, her books had vanished from her Kindle. Concerned, she emailed for help and was told Amazon and its affiliates “reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion.”

To drive the point home, Amazon added, “Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet the same action.” Taken aback, Nygaard replied that she was a long time Amazon customer in good standing. Amazon’s final reply, though, was even starker: “We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.”

A friend of Nygaard blogged about her saga, and like da Silva’s tweets, it quickly went viral. A few days later her accounts and books were restored with no explanation. Amazon presumably decided to quiet the public relations debacle. It had faced a similar uproar a few years earlier after deleting readers’ purchased copies of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, following a copyright dispute. Ironically, erasing 1984 was just the kind of thing the novel’s Big Brother would do.

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

These stories go beyond digital movies and books.

They now reach even into physical objects—when they’re powered by online software. Arlo Gilbert owned a Revolv device, a box that controlled his home’s doors, alarms, and lights. One morning he woke up and the device was dead, not just dead but “bricked.” And not just Gilbert’s machine. All the Revolvs in the world were bricked that day.

Turns out, Google had remotely activated a kill switch on everyone’s device. Why? Google had bought Revolv in 2014 when it was expanding into the “Internet of Things” market. It later decided to invest in a different home automation product line called Nest. What better way to boost sales of Nest than to terminate the software that powered Revolv? Deep in the terms of service for Revolv, Google had retained the rights to shut it all down.

In a blog post, Gilbert asked, “Which hardware will Google choose to intentionally brick next? ...Is your Nexus device safe? What about your Nest fire/smoke alarm? What about your Dropcam? What about your Chromecast device?” Gilbert was out of luck. He still owns the hardware, but it only works as a doorstop.

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

How do digital companies get away with this?

Imagine if Amazon were a local bookstore in the same dispute with Nygaard. Surely the bookstore’s employees couldn’t open the door to Nygaard’s home, walk into her study, and remove all the books she had bought from them. The same is true with Apple’s taking back movies from de Silva, or Google bricking Gilbert.

Yet that’s effectively what these online giants did—and had designed their ownership rights to do. The self-created power to “terminate accounts, remove or edit content” at their sole discretion is unequivocally spelled out in online contracts that no one ever reads.

Amazon, Apple, and Google are profiting from a transformation in the meaning of ownership for digital content.

For most of history, we lived in a world dominated by farms, horses, hammers, and bread. In that world, ownership mostly referred to tangible, physical things: we could stand on our land and hold on to our stuff. If you owned something, then for the most part you could exclude everyone else; you controlled the object and got to direct its fate.

This exclusion intuition is how most of us still think of ownership today—what we’ve called the on-off-switch image of ownership: It’s mine. Hands off.

Online companies know this. They count on that on-off response as they evoke our visceral and indeed instinctual feelings about ownership. But it is a bait-and-switch.

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

Lawyers sometimes describe ownership as a bundle of sticks.

When you say It’s mine in reference to a resource, often that means you own a lot of the sticks in the full bundle of ownership: the sell stick, the rent stick, the right to license, mortgage, give away, even destroy the thing.

Often we split the bundle up, as for a piece of land: there may be a landowner, a bank with a mortgage, a tenant with a lease, a neighbor with a right of way easement, a plumber with a license to enter the land, an oil company with mineral rights. Each of these parties owns a separate stick in the bundle.

In short, today, you just buy a limited use stick. Apple, Amazon, and Google hold the rest of the bundle. And they even keep a string attached to the stick you bought, so they can take it back if it suits their purposes.

Our intuitions still tell us that possessing the hardware is what matters. That’s been mostly true throughout human history. But more and more, it’s the software embedded in physical products that counts.

In the digital economy, we hold ephemeral licenses to streams of 1’s and 0’s—the ghost in the machine.

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Ownership Engineering: Things We Can Buy But Never Own

Despite the adage, customers are not always right. There is an increasing gap between what we feel like we own and what we actually own.

Owners of valuable resources operate a powerful remote control. They are always trying to design the particular rule that will influence others to do their will - with the most profit and least hassle.

Simply by tweaking the engineering of ownership, owners can use their control over valuable resources to gently, invisibly, but powerfully direct us to act how they want.

The remote control is effective because ideas about ownership become so incorporated into our everyday behavior that we don’t even notice the rules are being chopped up, fine-tuned, and redefined to push us around.

So the next time you’re surfing the web, ask yourself: Whose hand is on the remote control? Who gets what, and why?

And if you really, truly want to own something, consider finding something you can hold in your hands and keep on your shelf.

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“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn. By the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind you? Why does HBO look the other way when you illegally borrow a password to stream their shows? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair?

Mine! explains these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick a different rule. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. As Michael Heller and James Salzman show – in the spirited style of Freakonomics and Nudge – ownership is always up for grabs.

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Michael Heller and James Salzman are among the world's leading authorities on ownership. Heller is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. Salzman is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, with joint appointments at the UCLA School of Law and the UCSB Bren School of the Environment. He is the author of Drinking Water: A History.

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