Digital Rights What Are They?

Much like real property, digital property is characterized by the bundle of rights that accompanies it.  An owner of real property can retain title to the property while dividing the property rights in an economically beneficial way.  For example, an owner might lease the property to one person, sell the mining rights to the property’s natural resources to another, and sell a right-of-way to travel over the property to yet another.

In a similar way, the owner of digital property can sell or lease rights to the property in ways that maximize its value.  To illustrate the potential value of the rights accompanying digital property, one can look to online real estate.  Online real estate is a form of digital property that is accessible through the internet and mimics real estate in the physical world in many respects.  There is a multitude of rights inherent in a parcel of online real estate.  These rights include:

• Advertising rights.  In the physical world, a property owner can earn revenue by selling advertising space on billboards, marquees, kiosks, signposts, even wall space.  Likewise, the internet is ripe with opportunities for enterprising individuals and businesses to target potential clients through advertising on websites, message boards, 3-D virtual environments, and other online real estate space.

 

• Mining rights.  Similar to a landowner in the physical world offering the rights to minerals and other natural resources that exist on a parcel of land, online real estate frequently contains underlying resources that can make it extraordinarily valuable.  In the context of online property, these resources exist in the form of data.  Data can be mined from online property in a number of ways that can be beneficial to business interests, academic researchers, the medical community, and many other professional fields.

• Application rights.  A property owner in the physical world can make arrangements with businesses to operate valuable equipment on a piece of real property.  Software applications in the digital world can be thought of like physical equipment.  The rights to operate applications in an online space can add value to the online property and create significant business opportunities for the applications’ owners.

 

• Utility rights.  Utilities associated with real property are the “tools” that make the property useful and productive – electricity, water lines, and telecommunications lines among them.  The digital world has its utilities as well.  Discreet software functions, such as file converters, calculators, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), and defragmentation programs, among others, form a digital “tool belt” that can help make online real estate space more valuable and productive.  The opportunity to supply digital utilities to online property spaces represents real revenue potential for software developers.

• Service rights.  The need for third-party contractors to offer services to support business ventures exists in the digital world just as it does in the physical world.  Many online real estate spaces will benefit from access to services like data backup, printing and publishing, and network administration.  Providing these services in the online environment represents an excellent revenue stream that is ready to be tapped by entrepreneurs in the digital world.

 

• Commerce rights.  The exchange of good and services for money are the basics of commerce in both the physical world and the digital world.  In online real estate spaces, enterprising business owners will have the ability to earn profits by placing such things as pay-per-view content (including audio, video, graphics and text files) and vending portals within easy access of visitors to those online environments.

• “Flow” rights.  Landowners in the physical world also hold certain rights to those things that flow through their real property – natural resources such as water, petroleum, and natural gas.  The digital world sees similar “flows” of resources from one online space to another.  These resources include data, information, user traffic, and monetary funds.  The ability to monitor or even control or regulate these flows of digital resources can be valuable to properly-equipped businesses, and many online real estate owners will be eager to work with those who can offer the tools to tap into these flows.

 

This list of rights associated with digital property spaces is by no means exhaustive.  As technology and imagination uncover new ways to use digital property, there is no doubt that new rights will develop.  Once again, businesses that are ready to provide tools and applications to meet the demands of the digital world will be in an excellent position to contract with online property owners to tap into this online commercial environment.  The revenue possibilities, like the internet itself, are potentially limitless.