Peer-to-Peer Law: Further Reflections

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay (1)

1 ISCC - Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS

In this paper, I infuse political and legal theory with peer-to-peer decentralized design features. This experiment studies how property and liability, two core legal institutions attached to individual persons, react and can be transformed (like chemical elements) when applied a peer-to-peer, distributed design, with an empirical and evolutionary approach of hacking the law, seen as a regulatory system. In this jurisprudential analysis unfolding the theory of distributed architecture, I study the effect of applying peer-to-peer to the liberal legal institutions of property, liability and democratic political participation. In that sense, beyond using technology as a tool of the law, I propose to use technology as a tool for exploring and modeling the law. Peer to peer fragmentation is particularly disruptive for the law because the legal reasoning is used accustomed to operate on subjects which are characterized by and uniquely attached to some spatio-temporal existence. This ontological difference between the nature of distributed technology and positivist legal thinking is also reflected in the gap between the law, traditionally much more protective of the interests of capital with its identified owners, than of the commons, with a crowd of distributed peers.

Mots clés: Copyright law; Commons-based peer production; Commons; Distributed architectures; Decentralisation; Legal theory; P2p; Property; Liability; Political participation

Domaines: Science politique; Droit; Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay. Peer-to-Peer Law: Further Reflections. 2016. ⟨halshs-01448394⟩