Knowledge Commons

Knowledge Commons

Description

“Knowledge commons” refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge). “Commons” refers to a form of community management or governance. It applies to a resource, and it involves a group or community of people who share access to and/or use of the resource. “The basic characteristic that distinguishes commons from noncommons is institutionalized sharing of resources among members of a community”. Commons does not denote the resource, the community, a place, or a thing. “Commons” is the institutional arrangement of these elements and their coordination via combinations of law and other formal rules; social norms, customs, and informal discipline; and technological and other material constraints. Community or collective self-governance of the resource, by individuals who collaborate or coordinate among themselves effectively, is a key feature of commons as an institution, but self-governance may be and often is linked to other formal and informal governance mechanisms. More detail is supplied below. For the purposes of this chapter, “knowledge” refers to a broad set of intellectual and cultural resources. There are important differences between various resources captured by such a broad definition. For example, knowledge, information, and data may be different from each other in meaningful ways. But an inclusive term is necessary in order to permit knowledge commons researchers to capture and study a broad and inclusive range of commons institutions and to highlight the importance of examining knowledge com mons governance as part of dynamic, ecological contexts (see Benkler, 2013 and Cohen, 2006 on the importance of understanding the cultural environments in which knowledge resources are produced and used). Prior attempts to use “cultural environment” were cumbersome. For similar reasons related to inclusiveness, potentially narrower definitions of knowledge goods are avoided; in addressing resources, this chapter does not limit its discussion to precise distinctions among private goods, public goods, club goods, and/or toll goods. The resource set includes information, science, knowledge, creative works, data, and other related resources. “Knowledge commons” thus refers to the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation of a wide range of intellectual and cultural resources. This chapter provides an overview of efforts to develop and apply a research framework to investigate knowledge commons on a systematic basis, across a diverse range of contemporary and historical cases and across cases that are both supported by modern information technologies and those that pre-date or that operate independently of those technologies.

Source Publication

Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law

Source Editors/Authors

Peter S. Menell, David L. Schwartz

Publication Date

2019

Volume Number

2: Analytical Methods

Knowledge Commons

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