Defragging Ownership: How Corporations Sliced, Diced, and Sold the Bundle

Personal property ownership is in a precarious state, facing structural, economic, and legal assaults. As a result, the autonomy, security, and privacy that ownership once protected have been displaced by a tenuous reliance on opaque contractual arrangements and corporate goodwill. Owners no longer enjoy the unfettered right to access, use, and control their personal property. Through a range of seemingly unrelated business practices, companies have leveraged their growing power to disaggregate the property bundle into compartmentalized rights and privileges, which can then be individually licensed, leased, restricted, or even revoked.

Purchases no longer mark the end of buyer-seller relationships; instead, they signal the beginning of a manufacturer’s ongoing control—holding purchased goods hostage in exchange for continued payments, data collection, and remote oversight. Taking inspiration from the IT concept of “defragging” a hard drive—where scattered data fragments are recombined to restore function and efficiency—this Essay argues that we must now defragment ownership: reassembling fractured property rights into coherent bundles to reempower owners and restore legal clarity. To lay the groundwork for this goal, the Essay develops a taxonomy of structural attacks on personal property ownership by dissecting how market practices and corporate behaviors systematically undermine consumers. In doing so, it highlights the urgent need to address both the economic structures and legal doctrines enabling this erosion.

By calling for defragmentation, the Essay reaffirms that property law’s traditional bundles of rights remain essential to private ordering, standardizing expectations, and fostering trust in market transactions.