Governing Knowledge Commons

"Knowledge commons" describes how groups and communities share knowledge and information. Although commons institutions and organizations are used widely, successfully, and productively to generate and distribute new knowledge and innovation, they are not well understood in the factual context. How do knowledge commons work? When do they work well? When might they work poorly? Governing Knowledge Commons offers a systematic way to study knowledge commons, borrowing and building on Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning research on natural resource commons. This book offers a research framework that will be pertinent to scholars in a wide variety of fields, and includes essential case studies to demonstrate application and discussion of the framework.

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.