Exclusive enjoyment in practice

Sat 30 March 2024, Philippe Ropenga Artificial intelligence Digital assets

As an experienced Easter egg taster, you know that they often contain small chocolates and confections. This blog post is a legal Easter egg.

You know from a recent post that co-owners under indivision may claim compensation from another co-owner who enjoyed the piece property of to their exclusion.¹ How does one prove the exclusive enjoyment in practice? This question is a matter of fact. The French Cour de cassation, i.e., the supreme court that deals civil, commercial, and criminal matters, had to answer it by checking the application of Article 815-9 of the French civil code to the matter. A tenant gave back the key to a property at the end of the lease to one of the co-owners and no lease had been concluded afterwards.² According to the Court of Appeal, these facts did not constitute an exclusive enjoyment of property under indivision. Does the co-owner who has the key to an immovable property enjoy it exclusively? The Cour de cassation answered positively to this question.

Let us have a look at this legal issue in the context of artificial intelligence.

How may one prove that someone possesses an artificial intelligence that may be used be thousands of people and may be built upon open models or frameworks? There are no visible keys nor walls here. If one looks at the infrastructure that may be run by a Big Tech, the start-up that relies on it for its own service becomes a gear that only contributes to the infrastructure as discussed in the Christmas cracker last year.³ This is frustrating since software developers can hardly make their voice heard. Rikap and Lundvall show that open source largely benefits Big Tech.⁴ Experience in trusts and estates teaches not only to pay attention not only to a thing, be it a piece of code or a house, but also to consider to whom it benefits.

Have a Happy Easter time!

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