All About Knowledge Commons
... and data commons, information commons, innovation commons, infrastructure commons, and understanding sharing in institutional context ...
Is it wise to kick off this newsletter on a long-ish, somewhat more scholarly note? We’ll see.
My primary research today focuses on institutions, and specifically on institutions that we (my colleagues and I and a growing chorus around the world) call “knowledge commons.” Knowledge commons means institutionalized practices for sharing knowledge (as a broad and inclusive descriptor) in settings characterized by social dilemmas. Knowledge commons research is Ostrom-ian in instinct and style, after the Nobelist Elinor Ostrom, but it builds and extends its own program rather than simply applying any of Ostrom’s methods, findings, or prescriptions. Knowledge and so on present dilemmas of many sorts, few of which map readily onto the contexts that she and her colleagues and students studied.
What does that mean? Our website, documenting the virtual “Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons,” collects and summarizes the research that we’ve published over the last 15 years. And, here, I’ve copied the text of an entry on “knowledge commons” that I submitted earlier this year to the forthcoming (2025) Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law.
Knowledge commons refers to several interwoven concepts and practices. It is at once a domain of information and knowledge that is presumptively open and accessible; a field of research that aims to understand the character of governance of shared immaterial resources, such as creative works and innovative technologies; and a designation for a political practice of organizing communities around freely accessible scientific and creative materials. This entry describes each in turn.
As a domain of open and accessible knowledge, “knowledge commons” is associated with the concept of the public domain in patent law and copyright law, material that was never eligible for protection under relevant law or as to which relevant intellectual property protection has expired (Boyle, 2008). As the purpose of the public domain is to conserve a field of original and un-original intellectual material for re-use and adaption both by later authors and inventors and by the public as a whole, in this respect “knowledge commons” also may include creative material that is freely available under doctrines of fair use and fair dealing, as well as other exceptions and limitations to intellectual property doctrines. Knowledge commons is therefore central to the design and functioning of systems of cultural and scientific progress. Free, open, and un-governed access to intellectual resources are essential attributes of this framing of knowledge commons. Justice Brandeis famously wrote, “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions – knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas – become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use” (International News Service v Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)).
As a field of research, “knowledge commons” is associated with the legacy of Elinor Ostrom, whose work on “commons” governance of natural resources earned her the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. Ostrom collected abundant evidence of successful community governance of shared natural resources, such as water systems and forests, documenting human communities’ ability to overcome the possible “tragedy of the commons” theorized by Hardin (1968) without assistance from a central state authority or recourse to private property regimes (Ostrom, 1980). “Commons” in Ostrom’s sense are institutions for governance, by which communities solve collective action problems and other social dilemmas. Ostrom is often celebrated for deriving a set of “design principles” for effective commons governance, concepts that are anchored in underlying values of resource openness, proportionality as to community scale, and equitable participation among community members.
That institutional framing and the style of Ostrom’s case-based inductive research have been adapted to dilemmas associated with immaterial resources such as knowledge, information, and data, under the rubric “Governing Knowledge Commons,” or GKC (Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg 2014). “Knowledge commons” in this respect are community-based governance systems oriented to solving social dilemmas associated with the shared character of the resources that the communities produce, consume, or steward (Madison, Frischmann, Sanfilippo, and Strandburg, 2022). Ostrom herself, with Hess, observed late in her career that an institutional governance sensibility as to natural resource commons is relevant to systems of circulating works and inventions (Hess and Ostrom, 2007).
Knowledge commons as a research field does not merely extend Ostrom’s work simplistically in a new direction despite building on its method of systematic, topic-by-topic inquiry that seeks to break down a commons case into its several constituent elements: resources, community, rules and practices, and outcomes. In significant ways, while taking inspiration from Ostrom, knowledge commons research departs from her framing (Madison, 2024). Knowledge commons governance does not address depletable “common pool resources” of the kind that Ostrom studied; knowledge resources are, in principle, abundant rather than scarce. The “knowledge” of knowledge commons is broader and more inclusive than the creative production addressed by copyright law or the inventive practice addressed by patent law; “knowledge” is a shorthand for immaterial resources of all sorts that are collected or pooled in any way. Intersections between knowledge sharing institutions and systems of intellectual property rights are nuanced and require investigation in ways not contemplated by Ostrom and her colleagues.
Those nuances include the fact that intellectual property systems often define both the character of the immaterial resources, the preliminary conditions under which they might be shared, and the social dilemmas that result. Intellectual resources are produced and shared in blends and cumulatively in ways that distinguish them sharply from trees and fish. Knowledge commons research investigates ways in which even the public domain as an intellectual property concept is subject to social dilemmas and therefore gives rise to community-based governance, ensuring that intellectual products that are free and open as a matter of law are accessible in functional, practical terms. Knowledge commons research may productively examine cases of knowledge sharing such as information clearinghouses, patent pools, and so-called “intellectual production without intellectual property,” or “IP without IP” (Darling and Perzanowski, 2017), information institutions that do not qualify as “commons” in the formal sense that is often linked to Ostrom. Ostrom’s design principles have no definitive application to knowledge commons, in the absence of additional robust, sustained empirical investigation.
The internet and modern digital networked communications provide ample opportunities to see and study knowledge commons governance in practice. Wikipedia and open source software communities are clear examples of contemporary knowledge commons as institutional governance (Schweik and English, 2012). As a research framework, knowledge commons is equally suited to examining historical cases of knowledge sharing, such as the rise of early scientific communications in the Republic of Letters and the university as a knowledge-based institution. Knowledge commons as a research framework also encompasses sector-specific research on knowledge sharing practices, such as data commons, innovation commons, infrastructure commons, and scientific commons. Knowledge commons research may be deployed effectively to understand knowledge commons governance practices operating within market-based institutions, such as markets themselves, and corporations, and within or adjacent to the sorts of natural resource commons systems that Ostrom’s work addressed. In each of these instances, institution and system dynamics cannot be fully understood without attention to the roles played by knowledge sharing. In all cases, the research objective is to compile a systematic, empirically grounded understanding of knowledge governance.
As a political practice, “knowledge commons” is aligned with advocacy aimed at limiting or restricting the application of intellectual property rights in cultural and scientific fields, in order to enable broad downstream re-use of intellectual content and novel forms of creative and inventive collaboration (Bollier and Helfrich, 2012). Much of that advocacy is manifested in novel regimes of licensing, such as Creative Commons licensing for copyright works, open source licensing for computer software, open access publishing licenses, and in government mandates for open sharing of data and scientific results produced with the support of public funds. In this respect, because of its explicit attention to the proposition that knowledge is a public good in a political sense as well as an economic one, the politics of knowledge commons borrow substantially from the politics of “commoning,” a mode of open, inclusive, and democratic community governance of natural resources in agricultural and rural settings, now sometimes extended to community design in cities (Foster and Iaione, 2022). “Commoning” practices for both material and immaterial resources are sometimes idealized as alternatives to practices and institutions anchored in market capitalism in 20th century government regulation. Interest in “urban commons” make explicit that knowledge commons as a form of institutional governance of immaterial resources, especially with this political affect, is often linked in complex ways to Ostrom-style governance of natural and other material resources. “The good life” depends on effective governance of both how we live together and what we know collectively.
Although this entry has summarized three different usages of knowledge commons in practice and research, distinctions among them are rarely sharp, especially when the research products of Governing Knowledge Commons research are deployed in policy development, law reform, or analysis of legal doctrine. Those lines are blurred further by the fact that knowledge commons overlaps only partly with theoretical and practical questions typically associated with intellectual property law. The fields of knowledge commons are still in formation.