UC Irvine

Internet-based banking products, electronic commerce transactions, and internet-based offshore financial services are new objects of proprietary and regulatory concern. Each seems to circumvent state apparatuses such as community investment and taxation regimes designed, at least in principle, to serve the public weal. In this chapter I ask whether these new objects of property necessitate a rethinking of property's moral form. They are not merely challenging regulatory frameworks; they are challenging moral obligations involved in territorial state jurisdictionality. If property always entails moral claims, then new kinds of proprietary objects that trouble legal and regulatory obligations unsettle the moral orders in which property is constituted. Cyberspatial properties, by unsettling these moral orders, make visible the contours and the limits of liberal and critical theories of property, themselves bound up with its moral orderings.