ABSTRACT
Because of the technological development and so called ‘smartification of property’, modern society has faced situations when an owner of a thing has rights, or at least legal expectations, that the thing’s producer will sell spare parts, update firmware and support the working condition of cloud services. Such situations could be regarded as a challenge for traditional legal conception – absolute rights, owner’s independency and others. Although, a conception of the ‘new serfdom’ reflects many of the studied problems, it doesn’t explain the ongoing processes accurately. An approach that can describe the situation may be referred to as the new concept of a private property as a concession. Accordingly the property of private individuals is fiction. In reality, it is a concession on the part of the new feudal lords – corporations. Such an understanding makes it possible to understand the reasons for the appearance of relative rights and obligations on the part of supposedly absolute owners and the real reasons for their vulnerability.
Alexander E Kirpichev, Changes in Property Rights due to Digital Transformation: Towards a new Concession Theory of Ownership?, Justice 4(3):125-136 (November 2022).
Leave a Reply