Title: Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

Author: Michael Heller & James Salzman

Completed: Nov 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I have a difficult time not finishing books. Once I start them, even if I get bored, I usually finish. This was an exception. I got a little over a quarter of the way through it and was done. There are definitely interesting stories in it, but it feels like there are only a few that get repeated often. I think this would have been an amazing 5000 word article about how our understanding of ownership no longer aligns with the legal state of ownership and how companies are exploiting the ambiguity. Who owns the space where airline seats recline, the person reclining or are they trespassing into the space of the person behind them? This could be made clear by the airline but they prefer ambiguity so they can sell the space to both people. Interesting to think about but not for long.

Highlights:

• we still believe our ownership online has remained unchanged, as if owning a virtual book were just like owning a hard copy. It’s not the same. The result: we pay Amazon an unearned premium because of our mistake. Despite the adage, customers are not always right. There is an increasing gap between what we feel like we own and what we actually own.
• in Johnson v. M’Intosh, an 1823 Supreme Court decision that most lawyers read during their early days in law school. Being the first Christian European was what justified, as a matter of law, the claims of Spain to the Caribbean, Texas, Mexico, and California; of France to New Orleans, Canada, and much of middle America; and of England to New England and Virginia. But if that’s the case, why did the world not rise in protest when Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon in July 1969? That should have made the moon just as much a U.S. territory as early America was a European one. The answer is that by the 1960s, countries had renounced discovery and conquest as the basis for deciding who was first. In 1967 the United States, along with the Soviet Union and dozens of other countries, signed the U.N. Outer Space Treaty explicitly rejecting first-in-time for extraterrestrial resources. So when Armstrong became the first human on the moon, he was not asserting American ownership there. Indeed, to make America’s intentions clear, in 1969 Congress felt compelled to pass a law stating that when a U.S. astronaut places a flag on the moon, it is “intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.”
• For two centuries, America used a version of a reasonable prospect rule, giving patent monopolies to those first to invent—an open-ended standard that led to much litigation. Then in 2011 America switched to a bright-line first to file rule: regardless of how much progress competing inventors made, the patent went to whoever won the race to the Patent Office. America was the last country in the world to adopt the rule of capture for patents, following a debate in Congress that substantially tracked the majority and dissenting views in Pierson two centuries earlier.
• In a now-classic experiment, they gave some students nondescript coffee mugs, then asked how much cash they wanted in exchange for giving them up; they gave others cash and asked how much they would pay to acquire an identical mug. The prices should have been similar. After all, the mug was nothing special. In this experiment, it shouldn’t really matter whether you start out holding the mug or holding the cash. But that’s not what happened. Time and again, sellers thought the mug was worth more than double what buyers would pay, $5.78 versus $2.21. Hundreds of clever experiments have shown this discrepancy using chocolate bars, basketball seats, lottery tickets, music albums, and more. Chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys also demonstrate this behavior.