Ownership, Control, and Other Legal Issues

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 241-246

241

Ownership, Control, and

Other Legal Issues

Collaboration technologies surface many issues that gener-

ally were not given much thought in the days of paper-only

practice of law. Ownership, intellectual property, and “right

to use” issues traditionally arose only when lawyers left a firm

and took files, copies of forms, or other materials with them.

The maxim that “the client owns the file” resolved most issues

or disputes over who owned or had control over paper files.

Even the question of who was responsible for turning around

the next draft in a negotiation often turned on actual physical

possession of the draft document. Locked doors, drawers, file

cabinets, or even tying the strings on a Redweld folder were

used to handle many security issues. Shredders disposed of

paper documents. The onslaught of electronic documents and

their attendant issues now make the days of paper seem like

much simpler times.

The ability to easily create copies of digital files of any

type and electronically move them around may well be one

of the most important advances of our time. We have moved

from buying physical objects—books, tapes, CDs—to licensing

intellectual property rights wrapped in the form of digital files

and are well on our way to seeing “streaming” replacing the

notion of owning and storing digital files. Nicholas Negroponte

famously referred to this as the movement from “atoms” (stuff)

to “bits” (electrons).1 The copying of data has raised different,

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1. Nicholas Negroponte, “Bits and Atoms,” January 1, 1995. Available at https://

www.wired.com/1995/01/negroponte-30/.