Power in Recommendation and the Jurisprudence of Co-Experience: Who Has the Right to Interpret, Contest, Transmit, and Reproduce Shared Experience?

Abstract

An account of a shared experience is composed by one participant in a relation and used by a third party who did not participate in it, while the person it describes is ordinarily absent. This paper asks what rights attach to such an account and to whom, treating interpretation, contestation, transmission, reproduction, and ownership as five aspects of one object on the ground that the scope of the last four is fixed by the allocation of the first. It argues along two routes kept separate throughout: a doctrinal survey of four legal systems, and derivation from a set of principles of relational reproduction. The survey finds one allocation repeated across provisions enacted in different systems for different purposes, namely that the person described is granted access to an account of themselves and is withheld authority over its content; access and interpretive authority are shown to be separately allocable, and the convergence is explained by the prior location of interpretive authority in whichever party composes the account. Three further findings are reported: no located doctrine confers an integrity interest upon the person a work describes; positive law names the operative force of instruments whose force it has itself constituted and supplies no name for the force of an instrument working without legal constitution, with the consequence that exchanges of such instruments have no description in property law; and the events an account reports lie outside copyright entirely. Where the two routes meet directly, they conflict: copyright denies that authorship of a jointly produced past is shared, and denies it for a stated reason the paper accepts as sound. The framework's principle is therefore amended rather than defended, separating a claim to participate in settling an interpretation, which survives, from a claim to own accounts of the experience, which is abandoned. Two questions are stated and left open, with the conditions an answer would require.