When we poll audiences, most readily admit using other people’s passwords to illegally stream HBO’s hit shows. What’s surprising is that HBO tolerates, even encourages, this theft. The company could easily identify who’s stealing its content, but chooses not to. Tolerated theft is an advanced strategy of ownership control. Here’s what HBO is up to.

HBO’s president Richard Plepler proudly described the company’s pro-piracy strategy as “a terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers.” Illegal password sharing, Plepler argued, “presents the brand to more and more people, and gives them an opportunity hopefully to become addicted to it.” In a quote that lit up the Internet, Plepler added, “What we’re in the business of doing is building addicts, of building video addicts. The way we do that is by exposing our product, our brand, our shows, to more and more people.” And it’s not just HBO. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says, “We love people sharing Netflix. That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.”

For HBO and Netflix, the strategy depends on password sharers believing they’re stealing, just a little. Plepler and Hastings want lots of viewers to obsess over their shows whether they currently pay for subscriptions or not. Their strategy is that as today’s pirates start to age, more will start to pay for subscriptions and enjoy the feeling of going legit. The long-term plan goes deeper: the online media giants are waging a campaign to persuade consumers to adopt the media-friendly story of online ownership – a story that is today very much up for grabs.

Savvy businesses like HBO and Netflix use ownership like a remote control to steer you – powerfully and invisibly – to do what they want.

Who owns the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind? And who owns your online life: you clicking around or the tech giants selling your most intimate data? Turns out, these puzzles are both the same puzzle and they share a single answer: you lose. The prize goes to those who know how the simple rules of ownership really work.

Airlines are savvy pros at ownership design. They use a secret weapon that lets them sell the same space twice on every flight. The weapon is strategic ambiguity, a sophisticated tool of ownership design. Most airlines do have a rule—the passenger with the button can lean back. But they keep it quiet. Flight attendants don’t announce it.

Ambiguity works to the airlines’ advantage. When ownership is unclear—and ownership is unclear far more often than you might imagine—people mostly fall back on politeness and good manners. For decades, airlines have counted on high-altitude etiquette to defuse conflicting claims. Passengers negotiate among themselves as they angle ahead in line, nudge elbows over shared armrests, and jostle for overhead bins. Money rarely changes hands. (One study, though, suggests about three-quarters of passengers would agree not to recline if you offer to buy a drink or a snack for the person in front of you – but don’t offer cash, that doesn’t work as well.)

As experts in ownership design, airlines know how to profit from strategic ambiguity. They could “pre-cline” seats, fixing them at a set angle, but prefer to keep selling each wedge of space twice. This way, angry passengers turn against each rather than blaming the airlines that engineered the conflict. Still better—for the airlines—the discomfort creates a profitable market for higher-priced seats with more legroom and less hassle.

This is the real story for why people are leaning into your lap.

The identical ownership conflict is playing out today on the Internet. Our clickstreams reveal much of our private lives—what we buy, whom we follow, where we live, even how we vote. This may seem a world apart from airplane seats, but it’s the exact same ownership dilemma. Facebook, Google, and other Internet titans are reclining their data trackers into our virtual laps, earning billions in advertising fees by assembling uncanny profiles based on our likes and looks.

Like the airlines, tech companies are experts in profiting from ownership ambiguity. The companies created the cool websites we love to visit and they argue that this effort earns them the right to collect our data and then sell ads that stalk us creepily around the Internet. But if you know the hidden rules of ownership, you can push back. Ownership is up for grabs everywhere and always – in the air and online.

When you click “buy now” for a Kindle download, you may believe you own the book. After all, possession is nine-tenths of the law. But you really own much less. Amazon can, and indeed has, deleted books right off people’s devices. The company knows, and studies have shown, that we still believe owning a virtual book is just like owning a hard copy. It’s not. There is a growing divide between what we feel we own and what we actually own – and Amazon profits from our mistake. The customer is not always right.

Lynn Nygaard, an information technology consultant based in Oslo, is often on the road. In England, on a trip, she got a Kindle. Lots to read on a conveniently compact screen. On morning, though, she found her account blocked. Even worse, her books had vanished from her Kindle. Amazon replied to her emails that it “reserved the right to refuse service and terminate accounts.” After much back and forth, Amazon’s final reply said, “We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs.” Amazon only restored Nygaard’s account, after a friend’s blog account of the saga went viral.

Imagine if Amazon were a local bookstore in the same dispute with Nygaard. Surely, the bookstore’s employees couldn’t come into Nygaard’s home and seize all the books she had bought from them. Online, it’s fine. The tech giants are profiting from a transformation in the meaning of ownership for online content. They count on us bringing outdated intuitions about ownership of physical stuff when we shop online. But it is a bait-and-switch.

Owners of valuable resources operate a powerfulremote control. Simply by tweaking the meaning of ownership, they can invisibly and powerfully direct us to act how they want. So, next time you’re surfing the web, be aware of the false promise of the “buy now” button.

Any owner who controls a scarce and valuable resource needs to decide who gets access first. We are used to deciding this by who got in line ahead of the others. First come, first served, right? Not always.

Next time you are standing in any line, apart from passing the time by wondering whether the people in front are being paid to wait, think about the choices that went into its design. Owners with valuable resources had to decide that access would be allocated by line-standing rather another path to ownership, like an auction. The bottom line is that first-in-time is an ownership choice that owners can tweak for their profit, and not necessarily your benefit.

First come, first served may be the rule for delicatessens, but it leaves money on the table. Increasingly, the real rule is first come, last served. DisneyWorld lets one percenters skip every line on every ride. Families waiting for Splash Mountain don’t even notice as the wealthy pay $3,000 to enter directly through side doors. Next time you’re stuck waiting, consider: Disney is not alone. If you pay for Global Entry, you get access to the special fast line at airport security. Same for avoiding rush hour on highways if you pay to use the fast lane.

Governments and companies are taking familiar ownership stories and quietly flipping them upside-down. They are masters at tweaking the conventional understanding of first-in-time. To save time waiting in line,customers are willing, even glad to pay.

Designing ownership is not like deciding between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Our most important values are at stake. Quietly, across the economy, we see owners shifting the rules from first to last, from time to money, and from equality to privilege, all to advance their own interests, not necessarily yours. These choices come to define who we are as consumers and citizens in our interactions with each other over the essential goods of modern life.

More and more, businesses today voluntarily forgo patents altogether – even when the law makes them available. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX says, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.” Cutting-edge entrepreneurs know that there are multiple pathways to protecting innovation, and that legalownership is often over-rated.

IBM, said to be the world’s largest patent holder, now earns less from licensing its patent portfolio than from revenues related to Linux, an “open source” software language created and maintained by volunteers. The software is free for anyone to use, including IBM which sells hardware and services that work atop a Linux platform. Linux became so valuable to IBM that it even contributed $1 billion to support the free platform’s development.

Across the economy, businesses thrive without patents, indeed without any ownership at all. Bloomberg built a multi-billion-dollar business even though it doesn’t own the news that flashes across its terminals on financial traders’ desks. Instead, Bloomberg relies on being fast and first. Even a fraction of a second advantage justifies its super-expensive service.

Much of the cutting-edge innovation in our economy thrives without any ownership at all. Fashion houses design seasonal lines, chefs write new recipes, and standup comedians create routines – all without ownership. And knock-offs in all these highly dynamic markets are not theft. They are perfectly legal.

Business leaders and their lawyers have a bias – an unjustified faith, really – that legal ownership matters. Often, it doesn’t. The key is to deploy the hidden toolkit of effective substitutes for legal ownership – secrecy for SpaceX, first-in-time for Bloomberg, and social media shaming for fashion houses and comedians that copy too close to the original. We innovate without ownership.

A hundred times a day, without giving it any thought at all, you have to figure out accurately which ownership scheme controls the resources you want. Whether getting to the bar to buy a drink or choosing a place to lay your towel at the beach, you unconsciously ask, “How do I make this mine?”

Everyone saves seats – at the movies, in church, at AA meetings, on the train, for the Disneyland evening parade, or in the bleachers at the baseball game. Most claims of possession don’t actually turn on physical possession. They can’t, for the simple fact that it is impossible to hold onto everything you want to control, all at once – though little kids will try. We need ways to signal, “hands off, that’s my stuff!” For these signals to work, everyone needs to understand the unspoken language of possession.

People tailor their signal to the context. To say “this seat is taken,” they may use a jacket at the movies or an embroidered pillow at church. At Phish concerts, people use colorful tarps to stake out spots. Usually, seat savers meet no resistance. But sometimes, as the resource becomes scarcer, conflicts erupt – even among otherwise mellow Phish fans, when the tarps get too big.

A challenge for understanding the signals is that possession has dialects. For example, in New York City, a napkin on the glass signals to fellow bar-goers that you are coming back to your seat and tells the bartender to save your drink. In Wisconsin and parts of Pennsylvania that same napkin means you are done with both seat and drink. In parts of Europe, it just means “don’t bring me another beer, unless I ask.” If you speak the wrong dialect of possession, the sanction may be a padded bill or a bar fight.

During pandemic times, when sitting too close can be a life-or-death concern, it matters more than ever that we understand how ownership really works.

In public parks today, picnickers zealously guard chalk circles marked on the grass, their “little round human parking spots.” The same is true at outdoor restaurant tables, with customers shooing people away from their space. But we are not the real owners of the spaces we’re defending. They belong to governments and businesses that are using their ownership like a remote control, steering us gently, invisibly, and powerfully to do what they want.

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force advisor in 2020, instructed Americans to take an aggressive stance toward saved spots in parks and on the beach. “Remember that that is your space, and that’s a space that you need to protect.” We didn’t pay for the spots, though. So, what gives us the right to defend them?

The answer is possession. When we back away from a chalk circle in the park, we are respecting our most primitive, hard-wired understanding of ownership, one rooted deep in animal behavior. Our brains even have specialized cells, “bubble-wrap neurons,” that trigger anxiety if someone invades our space. Think for a moment about the last time someone took “your” saved spot, maybe in an exercise class or at church. How did you feel?

Often mere possession is not the law, it’s more powerful than law. Recall your last time on an airplane. Without thinking, you engaged in a series of intense possession battles – for armrests, overhead space, leg room, every inch of space. Maybe you took these contests personally, getting mad at your neighboring passengers.

Your anger was misdirected. Airlines are savvy masters of ownership design, and they deliberately set unwitting passengers against each other. They profit by adjusting the language of possession. And no one knows to protest.

Businesses and governments count on you believing that these signals are something natural and beyond contest. They are not. Like any language, possession is in constant flux. It is a choice and, more often than you realize, someone else is choosing rules for their benefit, not yours.