Possession is Nothing: KNI Legal Initiative Challenges 2,000 Years of Property Law

The Kingsman National Institute’s School of Philosophy, Politics & Law (PPL) has formally launched a flagship, multi-year research initiative to confront a foundational crisis at the heart of European and international law: the complete inadequacy of our legal system to define and govern digital assets.

The initiative, titled “The Res Digitalis Project” (The Digital Thing), moves beyond conventional legal analysis. It argues that the current legal framework—which is built almost entirely on Roman legal concepts of physical possession—is not just outdated, but is fundamentally broken when applied to the digital world. The project’s mission is to return to “first principles” to develop a new, coherent legal philosophy for digital ownership.

This research is being led by Professor Zofia Kaczmarek, KNI’s Professor of Political Philosophy & Jurisprudence, whose work has consistently focused on the friction between established legal traditions and modern state power.

“For more than two millennia, from the Roman concept of dominium (absolute ownership) to modern civil codes, our entire understanding of property has been based on tangible, rivalrous goods,” Professor Kaczmarek explained in her inaugural address. “A rivalrous good is simple: if I have your book, you do not. This logic of physical exclusion is the bedrock of our law.”

“The digital world,” she continued, “is non-rivalrous. A piece of data, a software license, or a digital identity can be copied infinitely, at zero cost, without depriving the original ‘owner’ of its use. This is not an inconvenience; it is a conceptual catastrophe for our legal system. You cannot ‘possess’ a data stream. We are trying to apply ancient rules to a reality that does not obey them, and the system is fracturing under the strain.”

This project is a quintessential example of the KNI “Athenian Synthesis.” It insists that a legal problem of this magnitude cannot be solved by lawyers alone. The Res Digitalis Project is a mandatory collaboration between the PPL faculty and two of our most advanced technical and economic research centres.

1. The Centre for Digital Ethics & Governance (CDEG): Our computational scientists and ethicists are tasked with the first, critical challenge: defining what a digital asset is. They will move beyond broad terms like “data” to create rigorous legal-technical definitions for distinct asset classes, such as a “personal data-self” (our predictive health profile), a “federated digital twin” (of a physical building or system), and a “non-fungible licensed asset” (such as a virtual art piece).
2. The Kolonaki Forum for Economic Policy (KFEP): Our economists will then be tasked with building models to value these assets. How do you value something that has no physical form, can be in multiple places at once, and whose value is determined not by scarcity but by network effects and accessibility?

The project’s initial phase will focus on three critical test cases where the current legal framework is visibly failing:

• Intangible Inheritance: When a person dies, who inherits their vast, non-physical estate? Does a digital music library, which is legally just a series of licenses-to-listen, simply vanish? Who has the right to access, control, or delete the deceased’s “data-self” or their lifetime of personal correspondence?
• The “Digital Twin” Dispute: If an engineering firm (like those from our HCSE) creates a highly detailed, real-time “digital twin” of a physical asset, like a power plant or a smart building, who owns the twin? Is it the owner of the physical plant? The engineering firm that wrote the code? Or does the data-rich twin itself have a form of co-ownership?
• Sovereign Data: Does a nation’s “data”—the aggregated, anonymised digital footprint of its citizens—constitute a new form of national resource, much like oil or minerals? Does the state have a right to control its export or tax its use by foreign corporations?

Professor Kaczmarek was frank about the project’s ambition and its “imperfect” nature. “This is not a project that seeks to find clever ‘patches’ for the existing civil code. We are not simply drafting a new regulation. This is a far more uncomfortable and foundational process. It requires us to admit that 2,000 years of legal tradition may have reached its conceptual limit. Our goal, in the true Athenian tradition, is not to provide a fast answer, but to ensure we are finally asking the right questions.”

The ultimate aim of the Res Digitalis Project is to publish a “White Paper on the Principles of Digital Sovereignty and Ownership,” intended to help guide European and international policymakers as they attempt to build a new legal order for the 21st century.