Digital Speech Acts Retain Control of Copyright with People, Not Platforms

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19263v2
• Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:45:39 GMT
• Title: Digital Speech Acts Retain Control of Copyright with People, Not Platforms
• Abstract summary: We argue that digital speech acts qualify for copyright protection under existing U.S. precedent.<n>We argue that copyright in digital speech acts is a prerequisite for digital sovereignty and democratic self-governance.
• Score: 1.5254598796939922
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Legal precedents protect computer code as copyrightable expression. They have enabled centralized digital platforms -- operating from corporate servers that hold all user data -- to construct private governance regimes through the interaction of copyright, contract, and technical architecture: people who create virtually all platform value must surrender effective copyright control through Terms of Service agreements as a condition of participation. In contrast, grassroots platforms consist of cryptographically-identified people operating their networked smartphones independently of any server or global resource; each person holds their own data on their own device, with no third party in possession or intermediation. Here, we define the notion of a digital speech act -- a deliberate volitional act by a person of cryptographically signing personal content with the person's private key, carried out on the person's own device -- through which the person simultaneously establishes attribution, accountability, and authorship over the signed content. We contend that (i) digital speech acts qualify for copyright protection under existing U.S. precedent: Burrow-Giles locates authorship in volitional creative choices despite mechanical or algorithmic processes, Feist supplies the minimal-creativity threshold, and persistent device storage satisfies the Copyright Act's fixation requirement; (ii) the digital social contract underlying grassroots platforms preserves this copyright by design -- signed content cannot be unbundled from its signature, and the full provenance chain accumulates as content is forwarded -- so that legal ownership and physical possession coalesce in the person; and (iii) copyright in digital speech acts is a prerequisite for digital sovereignty and democratic self-governance.

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