Governing Knowledge Commons

"Knowledge commons" describes the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources. It is the subject of enormous recent interest and enthusiasm with respect to policymaking about innovation, creative production, and intellectual property. Taking that enthusiasm as its starting point, Governing Knowledge Commons argues that policymaking should be based on evidence and a deeper understanding of what makes commons institutions work. It offers a systematic way to study knowledge commons, borrowing and building on Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning research on natural resource commons. It proposes a framework for studying knowledge commons that is adapted to the unique attributes of knowledge and information, describing the framework in detail and explaining how to put it into context both with respect to commons research and with respect to innovation and information policy. Eleven detailed case studies apply and discuss the framework exploring knowledge commons across a wide variety of scientific and cultural domains.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: Governing the Knowledge Commons ; Chapter 2: Learning from Lin: Lessons and Cautions from the Natural Commons for the Knowledge Commons / by Daniel H. Cole ; Chapter 3: Between Spanish Huertas and the Open Road: A Tale of Two Commons? / by Yochai Benkler ; Chapter 4: Constructing the Genome Commons / Jorge L. Contreras ; Chapter 4B: Governing Genomic Data: Plea for an 'Open Commons' / by Geertrui Van Overwalle ; Chapter 5: The Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network and the Urea Cycle Disorders Consortium as Nested Knowledge Commons / by Katherine J. Strandburg, Brett Frischmann, and Can Cui ; Chapter 6: Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo / by Michael J. Madison ; Chapter 7: Toward the Comparison of Open Source Commons Institutions / by Charlie Schweik ; Chapter 8: Governance of Online Creation Communities for the Building of Digital Commons: Viewed Through the Framework of the Institutional Analysis and Development / Mayo Fuster Morell ; Chapter 9: Creating a Context for Entrepreneurship: Examining How Users' Technological & Organizational Innovations Set the Stage for Entrepreneurial Activity / Sonali K. Shah and Cyrus C.M. Mody ; Chapter 10: An Inventive Commons: Shared Sources of the Airplane and its Industry / by Peter B. Meyer ; Chapter 11: Exchange Practices Among Nineteenth-century US Newspaper Editors: ; Cooperation in Competition / by Laura J. Murray ; Chapter 12: How War Creates Commons: General McNaughton and the National Research Council, 1914-1939 / by S. Tina Piper ; Chapter 13: Labor and/as Love: Roller Derby's Knowledge Commons / by David Fagundes ; Chapter 14: Legispedia / by Brigham Daniels ; Chapter 15: Conclusion ; Index

About the Author :
Brett M. Frischmann is Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. He is the author of Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford, 2012) which won the 2013 PROSE Book Award for the best book in law and legal studies. He is also co-author of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (4th edition, 2011). Michael J. Madison is Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Innovation Practice Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he writes and teaches about information law and theory, along with various disciplines of intellectual property law, contracts and commercial law, and property law. He is the co-author of The Law of Intellectual Property (4th edition). Katherine J. Strandburg is the Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law and Faculty Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, where she teaches and writes about intellectual property law, especially as it intersects with user and commons-based innovation, and information privacy law. She is a co-editor of several books on intellectual property and information privacy law and policy, and she regularly authors amicus briefs on these subjects.

Review :
Governing Knowledge Commons comes at the right time with the right mix of case studies for inferences on when, how, and for how long, commons institutions can provide production incentives while mitigating those for free riding. Increasingly, advances in knowledge, research, and solutions to economic and social problems occur where individual property rights are absent. Common property institutions can make productive cooperation possible, and this volume helps in understanding the linkages between the commons and creativity." The editors and contributing authors for this work are leaders in the movement to create a better understanding of knowledge commons governance, which holds the promise of leading to greatly improved innovation economics and processes. They are to be commended for creating this really excellent collection." Around 1985 Richard Stallman invented 'copyleft' to enforce sharing among dispersed computer programmers. Since then many other governed commons have evolved, or been recognized, using the tools of Elinor Ostrom and her co-workers. This valuable work unites structured analysis with case histories to further our understanding of how different sharing communities work. This is crucial information for societies hoping to resolve the dilemmas now afflicting the production, preservation, adaptation, and interplay of intellectual products." This book takes up the challenge of examining the governance of 'knowledge commons' involving the sharing and creation of data, information, and knowledge. It extends the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by Elinor Ostrom to study natural resource commons and applies the adapted framework to study a set of very interesting cases. The result is a fascinating collection of cases studies of knowledge commons ranging from the Galaxy Zoo citizen science/crowd-sourcing project to Open Source Software and the Sourceforge repository."