The ownership challenge in the Internet of things world

摘要

The products of the fourth industrial revolution will come in the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. They will be unified cyber-physical entities. A fallout of this paradigm is that our orthodox conceptions of private property and ownership will come under stress in ways not experienced before. The rights and boundaries of ownership will become obfuscated and hard to demarcate in the IoT-world. In this paper, we explore these issues from historical and theoretical perspectives to speculate on possible institutional and policy arrangements to manage the challenge. Towards this end, we propose a threshold utility principle of ownership that can serve as the starting point of addressing the private property and ownership challenge in the emergent IoT world.