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

2026-06-17

AI Summary

This study addresses how centralized platforms undermine users’ digital sovereignty by stripping them of copyright control over their creative content through terms of service. To counter this, the paper proposes a “digital speech act” mechanism wherein users cryptographically sign their content with a private key on local devices, thereby embedding authorship, attribution, and accountability directly into the technical architecture. Integrating authors’ rights theory, decentralized identity, and local storage, the mechanism leverages asymmetric encryption, signature binding, and traceable propagation chains to ensure inseparability between content and its cryptographic signature. The analysis demonstrates that such acts satisfy the U.S. Copyright Act’s requirements of originality, volition, and fixation, thereby qualifying for legal protection under existing frameworks. This approach establishes both a legal and technical foundation for users to maintain persistent, autonomous control over their digital copyrights.

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 \textit{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 (\ia) digital speech acts qualify for copyright protection under existing U.S.\ precedent: \textit{Burrow-Giles} locates authorship in volitional creative choices despite mechanical or algorithmic processes, \textit{Feist} supplies the minimal-creativity threshold, and persistent device storage satisfies the Copyright Act's fixation requirement; (\ib) 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 ownership and possession coalesce in the person; and (\ic) copyright in digital speech acts is a prerequisite for digital sovereignty and democratic self-governance.

Problem

• copyright control
• digital speech acts
• platform governance
• user sovereignty
• content ownership

Innovation

• digital speech act
• copyright by design
• grassroots platforms
• cryptographic attribution
• digital sovereignty