Good to hear from you even in snark master mode. Still you make a fine point. That was a remnant from the working paper status where I think it makes sense. I will update the version on there.

One thing some folks have been discussing is when does SSRN work well for working papers. Put differently, is SSRN becoming a place where only fully finished pieces are circulated?

Deven

I began reading your paper after downloading it from ssrn, but when I reached the legend proclaiming “DRAFT – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION” I decided to stop. It was, I concluded, better to remain ignorant than to risk obtaining knowledge that I could not even cite too in my own scholarship.

These legends are the academic equivalent of the Major League Baseball warnings – and they make about as much sense.

If I had been able to read you article I might now observe some irony between your general theme and the application of the odious “DRAFT – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION”. However, as I feared such an observation might amount to a citation, I decided to merely assume the contents of your paper and write this comment without the benefit of having read the paper.

Please feel free to cite and circulate this comment.

Matthew Sag

Deadly accurate observations. The paper explicitly carves out some of the virtual world issues though those are implicated. Ownership has the problems you note. Part of the goal is to look at the property arguments try to sort out a reasonable way to limit the interests in intangibles. I think you are getting at one of the key questions in the paper regarding heirs’ access. Take a read as I would love to know what you think about my approach. But it seems that the author should be able to choose whether to preserve or destroy the thing (I came at as preservation but Lior Strahilevitz’s Right to Destroy is almost a mirror argument from the other view, and I show that in the paper). If the author wants to thing to go to the heirs, so be it. The system as it is does not seem to allow for that type of control. That is an error in my view.