Abstract:Legal precedents protect computer code as copyrightable expression. They have enabled centralized digital platforms -- operating from corporate servers that hold all user data -- to construct private governance regimes through the interaction of copyright, contract, and technical architecture: people who create virtually all platform value must surrender effective copyright control through Terms of Service agreements as a condition of participation.
In contrast, grassroots platforms consist of cryptographically-identified people operating their networked smartphones independently of any server or global resource; each person holds their own data on their own device, with no third party in possession or intermediation. Here, we define the notion of a \textit{digital speech act} -- a deliberate volitional act by a person of cryptographically signing personal content with the person's private key, carried out on the person's own device -- through which the person simultaneously establishes attribution, accountability, and authorship over the signed content. We contend that (\ia) digital speech acts qualify for copyright protection under existing U.S.\ precedent: \textit{Burrow-Giles} locates authorship in volitional creative choices despite mechanical or algorithmic processes, \textit{Feist} supplies the minimal-creativity threshold, and persistent device storage satisfies the Copyright Act's fixation requirement; (\ib) the digital social contract underlying grassroots platforms preserves this copyright by design -- signed content cannot be unbundled from its signature, and the full provenance chain accumulates as content is forwarded -- so that ownership and possession coalesce in the person; and (\ic) copyright in digital speech acts is a prerequisite for digital sovereignty and democratic self-governance.
From: Ehud Shapiro [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:40:11 UTC (78 KB)
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