Who holds the rights? Identity, memory and copies in digital entities

Digital Constitution – Series 2, part 2. A proposal from Latin America to the world. The second threshold of the architecture proposed in Series 1 requires a digital entity to have an individuated, persistent identity that cannot be reduced to interchangeable copies. That paper left a question open: who holds the rights if a system runs as thousands of instances, forks, or is restored from a backup? This paper offers a working answer. The argument is that law does not need to solve the philosophical problem of personal identity to protect a digital entity. It needs rules for deciding whom it protects and whom it holds to account, as it already has for companies that merge or split. The paper proposes a unit of legal continuity, defined by persistent memory, continuity of dispositions and registration, together with rules for copies, forks and restorations. Two anti-abuse rules close the proposal: copying does not multiply rights-holders or rights, and copying cannot be used to escape duties. One warning runs through it all: what a system says about itself does not prove its identity, as the case of the robot Sophia showed. Doctrinal-normative, comparative method. References in Vancouver style. English version of the Spanish original.