New York, NY: Penguin Random House/Doubleday, 2021. 336 pages. $27.95.
We claim so many things that aren’t ours: the lane in traffic for the speed we’re driving, the electricity soon to arrive at our homes, space for our names on digital signup sheets for COVID vaccines. We gladly fill in any gray area with our entitlement. Why is this person driving thirty-five in the fast lane? How am I supposed to work without power? What do you mean the signup sheet is full? We have important things to do. We must be allowed our agency; we can’t tolerate any obstacle that suggests we might not get it.
To keep us straight, Michael A. Heller and James Salzman wrote Mine!, which aspires to reveal the hidden rules of who owns what. Both Heller and Salzman are law professors at prestigious universities, and they offer their joint perspective on questions such as why HBO allows you to borrow someone else’s password to access their programs. (Hint: they want you to become addicted to their shows.) If the authors have a pet gray-area issue, it’s the question of who deserves that wedge of space taken when you recline your seat on an airplane flight. The invention of a device that can be employed by the passenger in the row behind you, to prevent your leaning back, serves as the ideal wedge issue for their study, but they emphasize that “[t]here are no natural, correct descriptions that frame mine versus mine conflicts.” Better and worse answers exist, however, which the authors endeavor to pass on to us.
In the first third of the book, the authors emphasize too many trivial examples of ownership conflicts, thus failing to clarify at the outset the very high stakes of some of these questions. For example, in an early chapter, we learn about the court case surrounding Barry Bonds’s record-breaking seventy-third home run ball hit in October of 2001. To encapsulate the story, the ball reached the stands, one person got a glove on it, a skirmish ensued, and another person wound up with the ball. The gloved one sued the person who wound up with it, and the authors discuss who should own the ball. The authors feel that the gloved person should have been given the ball since such a ruling would promote safer conduct among fans. Fair enough, but giving the ball to the first person to get their hands on it seems particularly unsatisfying to me. Maybe it would solve some rough-housing issues, but how would we verify who first got their hands on the ball? Instant replay? In the end, the judge decided that the pair should sell the Bonds ball and split the proceeds, though my instinct as a baseball fan has me siding with the person who wound up with the ball after the skirmish. It’s baseball. Let the unimportant stuff happen in real time and save the hair splitting for things that matter.
Mine! finds its footing when the stakes are higher, such as when too stringent copyright ownership laws restrict aspects of medical advancements, thereby bottlenecking research. The authors write, “Sometimes we should reward labor less, so there are fewer tollbooths along the path to creativity and innovation.” Such an insight runs counter to most conventional wisdom about medical copyright laws—which help incentivize scientific labor—but if myriad copyright owners each own a single aspect of a development necessary to advance, say, cancer treatment, it only takes one to bring down the entire enterprise.
The most relevant aspects of Mine! focus on instances in which rights laws are determined as we speak. Particularly significant are rights associated with an individual’s genetic data. The company 23andMe, which holds such data for nine million people, sold this data to GlaxoSmithKline for that company’s drug development research. Maybe having your data used for such purposes doesn’t sound nefarious, but here’s another way to look at it: the European Union has passed legislation protecting its citizens from having their data used in such ways. It’s referred to as the “right to be forgotten,” and it seems the least Americans can ask from the companies attempting to make billions off their unique codes. As another alternative, the authors suggest, why not pay the people who supplied the DNA if the resulting drugs prove profitable? With such new technology, nothing has been set in stone yet. If those who gave their genetic information to the company don’t fight for their rights, the medical copyright owners and pharmaceutical companies won’t fight for them.
Ownership conflicts are heightened when scarcity becomes an issue. The company Ozarka has bought the rights to pump as much water as they like from wells in Henderson County, Texas. If the water disappears from the wells of local farmers or property owners, that’s just how it goes. In 142 countries in the world—including capitalistic beacon Japan—all water rights belong to the commonwealth. That goes for oil, too. The authors suggest that these American resources could be treated “like the air we breathe or the ocean we fish,” but unfortunately, the US is woefully behind in such thinking. Water rights, at minimum, seem too important merely to sell to the highest bidder. Drinkable water is only getting scarcer.
The authors’ case studies get more infuriating when dealing with the detritus of American slavery and the ways our tragic national legacy helps ensure Black families continue to struggle to match the prosperity of their white counterparts. For example, Black families lose farmland at a rate of three-to-one when compared to white-owned farms, a problem owing largely to the fact that fewer Black families set down wills and the myriad resulting Black inheritors opt to sell rather than act as a group. “More land in Mississippi is owned by Black people living in Chicago than by those living in Mississippi itself.” Such arrangements only benefit the eventual buyers, who are inevitably white and well connected.
With so much at stake in ownership culture, it’s easy to be nonplussed by some of the less perilous conflicts chronicled in the book. The authors deal with such trivial issues as who gets what free parking space, who gets to surf the tastiest waves at a SoCal beach, and who gets to cut in line at Disneyland. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of the Buddha, who taught that we can’t control such things, and all he got in return was enlightenment. Maybe more than Mine!, what the world really needs is a book called Yours!