aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Property rights protect future profits?
In the 1890 article that launched privacy law in the U.S., Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis said:
The possibility of future profits is not a right of property which the law ordinarily recognizes. (in The Right To Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890)).
These authors were trying to persuade their readers of the existence of a general right in individuals to be let alone. They didn’t think this right to be let alone was a property right, because (in part) they didn’t believe that the concept of property was broad enough to cover privacy. For example, if true but private facts were published about a man, and that publication made his life difficult (or ruined him), Warren and Brandeis felt that property law wouldn’t necessarily protect him—because “the possibility of future profits is not a right of property which the law ordinarily recognizes.”
We now live in an era in which possessors of things they believe to be their “property” fervently believe that law protects their possibility of future profits.
Read on for her examples, Google Book Search and tiered Internet access. Yes, why is it our sympathies are with publishers and network builders and we fail to see a concomitant public right to reasonable and fair access to the fruits of our culture?
