Digital Ownership Quotes

Since the beginning of the internet era, it has been pretty widely accepted that when you join an online service, whatever data you put into it belongs to you.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

I'm a huge fan of e-books, but the more I buy and download, the more I worry that someone could just take them all away from me.

Purchasing and downloading a book on to your e-reader won't necessarily protect it from disappearing.

Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.

What proplets do is they look to the blockchain to see who owns them; they are kind of like SIM cards today - they know where they are at.

When Coinbase was starting, we thought we were seeing the birth of something that was really important - what I would almost describe as the future fabric of society - the system for who we are - our identities, what we own, our assets.

Bitcoin has a core technological innovation: The ability to publicly verify ownership, instantly transfer that ownership, and do so without the need for a trusted third party.

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

People assume that we have certain rights based on property that may be different now in a digital world.

Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies.

On the blockchain, you have a public ledger, which is the form of ownership. That means you are not doing net settlement - just netting everything down, which means that everything has been turned into fungible numbers.

We don't want to own people's photos. We want to help them communicate with friends in whatever way makes them happiest.

We live in a world of virtual goods where none of us own the 0s and 1s. What are you going to do?

You buy a movie, you should get it anywhere you want it. You pay for a network, you should have that anywhere you want. Same thing with a magazine.

I think the Internet is comparable to the Homestead Act: Here's a parcel of land. Sign up, cultivate it, it's yours.

If you buy a CD and want to put your favorite songs on one CD, you should be able to do that.

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

The biggest companies in the world right now are made up of trillions of dollars of digital assets that really, in my opinion, should belong to us as individuals.

Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership - because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.

The revolution of video had a massive affect. We grew up in a time where suddenly you could own films. Before, they had a theatrical run, and then perhaps they'd come back, or you'd catch them in a retro cinema.

Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.