Abstract

This essay resorts to relationalism as a heuristic to explain the legal implications of a digital economy. In a digital economy, traditional concepts of property in goods, individuals and exchange are different. A digital good is not a defined entity and it has unstable boundaries. Because of its very nature, a digital good cannot be owned in a common sense; it is rather shared. Accordingly, the contractual paradigm that better fits such a new framework is not the exchange in the ordinary meaning, but the relation of sharing. From passive consumers, individuals claims more a proactive role, as also producers of digital goods. Such a radical change in the economy is not matched by a renewed perspective in the way the law is thought of, written, interpreted, and applied.