Software License
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Software is generally sold as a license—a set of legal permissions—not a tangible object. Although you may take home a box from the store, it is not the CD inside that you are paying for, but the right to use the software encoded on the CD. When you purchase software, you do not acquire an object so much as you enter into a relationship with the program's creator, which gives you license to use the software. In the digital realm, words and relationships are often more valuable than objects. While the robber barons of the nineteenth century made their fortunes by controlling physical resources, many of the billionaires today control access to intellectual property, and Disney has revenues in the tens of billions yearly.
On the web, in the absence of physical real estate, virtual real estate is composed of the words that constitute domain names. Vast legal battles are fought over control of the hottest real estate. In the 1990s, Stephen Cohen (American entrepreneur) stole the domain sex.com from Gary Kremen (American entrepreneur, born 1963). When the dust had settled, after ten years of legal battles, Cohen was arrested after having fled the country, Kremen was awarded tens of millions of dollars in damages, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that domain names were in fact personal property.
See Also
- Software License
- Ritual Objects
- Scholar's Rock
- Architecture
- Object Oriented Programming
