These comments seek to consider natural rights and moral rights separately, which may be pure folly. I make this distinction because of my developing belief that what we inherently own and what we decide we own may well be two different things. Moral rights involve a decision (i.e., the exercise of will). We’ll see.

Real Property:
Natural Rights: 90%, based on the notion that possession is 9/10 of the law.
Moral Rights: 47%
A large part of my reasoning here draws on Locke’s notions concerning labor and property — property acquired through sweat of my brow is mine. Following this oft-cited formula, what I own is irrefutably my property and nobody else’s.

However, the notion of moral rights may complicate this issue. Let’s say I own a wheelchair that I don’t use, and my neighbor breaks her ankle. She’s an uninsured graduate student, and I know she can’t afford her own. Am I morally obligated to either give or lend her my wheelchair? Just about anyone would say yes, and society would think less of me if I didn’t. Therefore, we might say that I will relinquish some of my rights to ownership, either permanently or temporarily, for moral reasons. My societal position also matters in such cases — it’s easier socially to be the stingy bastard that lives down the street than it is to be the mayor who wouldn’t lend his wheelchair to someone who needs it and therefore suffers the effects of press reportage on his/her actions. Therefore, moral decisions about ownership differs from inherent rights based on a number of external factors*.

Intellectual Property:
Natural Rights: 80%
Moral Rights: 47%
One might assume that human beings begin as the Lockian tabula rasa, and that therefore nothing in our heads is really ours. Social constructivist theories lead down this same path. However, there remains the fact that in spite of our common cultural and intellectual input, we each retain very individual opinions and tastes on common subjects. We are each, to a certain extent, a product of our own will — and therefore, our thoughts are also products of an individual will. What could be more personal?

I understand that in Tuesday’s class, the example of a pen vs a cellphone came up — one might not expect to recover a pen or money, but we do expect to recover a cellphone. In other words, we expect to recover an object that we have imposed our will and personality on (in the form of data and ringtones), while we don’t expect to recover generic objects. (I realize that I’m totally mixing property types here — but I hope it illustrates a point. I’m also contradicting myself, since I’m a big believer in Feist. Grrr.)

It seems to me that, in a natural sense, once those thoughts are let loose in the world — through presentation or publication, for instance — then they are no longer one’s own, and beyond right of first sale and 106 provisions, one cannot claim sole ownership. Once released, the work is subject to derivation.

One may also decide that, morally, one does not own part or all of one’s thoughts that are not yet formally expressed. As students and teachers, we have a moral obligation to our scholarly communities to share our thoughts in seminars, colloquia, and conversation. This is particularly true of a teacher who has entered a mentor position. A senior professor who gains a reputation of not sharing thoughts with her students is subject to the same sort of scorn as the stingy mayor in the above example. An artist or musician may feel that they have a moral obligation to waive some or all of their 106 rights, and therefore license it under CC provisions.

*No, this illustration does not have any correlation to my situation. I was just thinking about wheelchairs a lot at the moment.