There is No 'There' There: Intel v. Hamidi and the Creation of New Property Rights Online

Abstract

The development of the internet as a medium for conducting commercial activity has led to a series of legal disputes between competitors and other parties concerning the allocation of the potential revenue to be derived from these activities. The pleadings for such disputes, not surprisingly, tend to set out numerous causes of action in the hopes that at least some will be amenable to reasoning by analogy as judges confront novel claims. The danger, however, of an ad hoc approach to the progressive development of common law as it applies to online disputes is that hastily scattered doctrinal seeds may develop unexpectedly into firmly entrenched judicial roots. The objective of this brief comment is not to resolve the issue of propertization of online transactions, but simply to demonstrate that doctrinal implementation of property norms should not be predicated on the questionable legitimacy of using metaphors of place and object as the conceptual framework for analyzing online disputes.

Keywords: internet, property, intellectual property