I can find a lot more to agree with in Tim's clarification of his views on ownership of cyberspace:
In different words, the list exists as an "emergent phenomenon," like a popular trend or a fad. It's "official" existence is not crucial, as that could evaporate, change, etc.
[...]
To wrap it up: Cyberspace ownership has more similarities to the voluntary asssociations desscribed here--customer bases, clubs, subscriptions to magazines, etc.--than to conventional ideas of "public" and "private" property ownership.
--Tim May
Getting back to the original discussion, though, I think the point remains that such a tenuous and abstract form of ownership does not serve as a good foundation for a model of cyberspace as private property. Cyberspace, in my view, is essentially a conversation. Its value comes from the interplay between different people who contribute, each bringing their own expertise and points of view. It seems odd to me for someone to lay claims to the ownership of the conversation, especially someone who is not participating. One problem in thinking about these issues is focussing too closely on cur- rent software in the form of mailing lists and usenet. Already newer forms of communication such as IRC, MUDs, etc. are breaking out of these molds. Other possibilities include more fluid communications models where organization is provided by links between messages. In such a system, there would be no "cypherpunks list" as such; rather, messages on the kinds of topics we find interesting would be linked together in various ways, with side ties to messages on related topics as well. Who would "own" this kind of cyberspace? One possible unambiguous answer is to simply say that people own their own words, and to leave it at that. In that sense nobody owns the cp list; rather, each poster owns his postings. This is pretty uncontroversial, I think. But even then the value of a posting depends heavily on the context in which it appears, and this simple ownership model does not particularly capture that. Because of these considerations, I think cyberspace is not really subject to the kinds of ownership and control that we associate with private property. Look at the Extropians list as an example. They try to say that the list is private property and feel free to kick people off. But sometimes people get disgusted with their autocratic practices and leave. The list ends up losing value. The more they tighten their iron fist of ownership the more individuals slip out of their grasp, to paraphrase noted cyberspace pundit Princess Leia. (I say this not to disparage members of that list, which has a lot of talented people, but because to me it is a good example of the mis- application of the idea of private property.) My model of the ultimate future of cyberspace emphasizes selectivity and filtering of a huge corpus of messages, articles, essays, debates, etc. The hard part is going to be picking out what is interesting to you, and making your contributions in such a way that interested people see them. I really don't think our current infrastructure of mailing lists and usenet does a very good job of this, and I hope that in the future better approaches will be possible. It's not clear what role ownership will play in that system. Hal