John Locke said that what makes something yours, in a natural setting, is your having invested effort into making it what it is. A wild berry bush might be anyone's, but once you have picked the fruit, that fruit is yours. Whether or not you buy this theory of ownership -- there are competing theories -- there is something about it I find intuitively appealing.

Some time ago, I saw one friend kick another off of his minecraft server -- and when I objected, he said it was his server, which he paid for, and he could do what he liked. As indisputible as this was, I couldn't escape the impression that the other friend, having invested months of time into building things in that world, in some sense owned those things, and that this was a moral consideration that changed the circumstances and made them different from someone who had spent five minutes in the server.

At one time I ran a gaming ladder for a small community. And while it was undoubtably mine -- I developed it and paid for it and was central in running it -- as the accumulated history of the community on the ladder grew, as the ladder became central in the life of that community, I couldn't escape the impression that all of that data and history was theirs, maybe even more than it was mine. And indeed, a previous ladder in the same community had been run by someone who saw it (very rightly) as his and ran it how he liked -- and after some unpopular decisions, the community reacted by perceiving him as a tyrant. Is this an odd intuition? I think it's one we've all voiced at some point in this era, even if we couldn't defend the idea logically.

I think this philosophical tension is at the center of a lot of struggles in our age. Facebook was certainly made by certain individuals -- they can certainly do what they like with it. And yet I can't escape the impression that the platform wasn't made by them alone -- that what it has become, both in the larger society, and in my personal circles, is what we made it by use. I don't know exactly what that implies from a moral standpoint, only that the intuition of ownership Locke desribes seems to me somehow to apply, and to be describing something real.

I think the same applies to this issue. George Lucas made Star Wars. Without a doubt. But what Star Wars was in 1977, and what it was in 1997, and what it was in 2017, are entirely different things. Some of that change was wrought by Lucas himself, but a lot of it was wrought by us -- the culture that watched it, and talked about it, and adopted it into the milleu. In 1977 it was cool, but in 1997 it was something much closer to literature, to required reading. (And in 2017 it is something else -- one of the niche kingdoms again, and perhaps yet different rules apply.) Can one person own that? The community seems to have generally rejected Lucas' rightful ownership over the series, which I take as a general consensus that, even if we can't philosophically defend why we think this, even if it's happening on an intuitive moral level, people broadly agree that at this point the world owns Star Wars more than the creator does. That people are looking at its maintenance less like a private estate, where the owner can do what he likes, and more like a public government, where the citizens are right to regard bad behavior as equating to illegitimacy. (And Disney owning it seems like a legal quirk that has nothing at all to do with moral intuition.)

Cultural works in general seem to follow this path, from private to public, from entirely owned by the creator to entirely owned by the community. But the ability of that community to actually guarantee access is different than it used to be. Decades ago, Lego was part of the universal landscape of childhood. At one point it was owned by The Lego Group, but at some point it seemed to be owned by everyone, taken for granted in the cultural landscape -- and no one had the power to tell a kid who was interested that he couldn't play with Legos. But Minecraft fills that niche now, and a hundred other things fill a hundred similar niches, and it is absolutely easy for a corporation to stop a kid from playing -- a power so obscenely socially costly as to chill the behavior of parents. Does that seem intuitively like a tyrannical, if not an evil, change in the world? It does to me. But I don't think the pirates are right, either -- I do think ownership means something. We don't have good rules for this. We have moral intuitions, but no ethical heritage.

I don't know where the line is. I don't know what models apply. I don't know what all this means morally, let alone legally. We need a Locke to tell us. But I cannot escape the impression that Locke has a point here, and that consumption may be its own form of creation, and that figuring out how to deal with all of this in a fair way remains one of the most novel and interesting questions of our age.