Abstract
Today’s copyright clearance culture endows intellectual property owners with personal claims on their works and places users at an impersonal, transactional distance as good or bad customers. This essay argues for the existence of a personal property relation between users and protected works. Building on Margaret Jane Radin’s influential work on property and personhood, it proposes that we are overdue for a tenants’ rights revolution in intellectual property law. Such a development would recognize that IP users can, through a sustained engagement with a protected work, begin to constitute themselves as persons in relation to that work much as a tenant does in relation to a rented habitation, with all the attendant circumscriptions of the ownerlandlord’s sovereignty. After proposing a new, fifth fair-use factor that would heed the character of the user’s relationship to the work, the essay closes with a thought experiment in the kinds of expressive deployments such a provision could enable.
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