This Article addresses conservation, preservation, and stewardship of knowledge, and laws and institutions in the cultural environment that support those things. Legal and policy questions concerning creativity and innovation usually focus on producing new knowledge and offering access to it....

Assessments of the relationship among law, innovation, and economic growth often begin with one or more propositions of law or law practice and predict how changes might affect innovation or business practice. This approach is problematic when applied to questions of regional economic...

This short paper reflects on the emergence of codes of best practices in fair use, highlighting both the relationship between the best practices approach and an institutional perspective on copyright and the relationship between the best practices approach and social processes of innovation and...

I revisit the distinction between intangible works of authorship and tangible objects, which is a fundamental proposition of modern copyright law. I suggest that reconsidering that distinction, at least in part, may expand the range of possibilities for aligning modern copyright as an economic...

This Essay considers the problem of understanding intellectual sharing/pooling arrangements and the construction of cultural commons arrangements. We argue that an adaptation of the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment may...

This Essay describes a social practices approach to the production of creative expression, as a construct to guide reform of copyright law. Specifically, it reimagines copyright's fair use doctrine by basing its statutory text explicitly on social practices. It argues that the social practices...

Governing Medical Knowledge Commons makes three claims: first, evidence matters to innovation policymaking; second, evidence shows that self-governing knowledge commons support effective innovation without prioritizing traditional intellectual property rights; and third, knowledge commons can...

Standard accounts of IP law describe systems of legal exclusion intended to prompt the production and distribution of intellectual resources, or information and knowledge, by making those things artificially scarce. The argument presented here frames IP law instead as one of several possible...

This chapter describes methods for systematically studying knowledge commons as an institutional mode of governance of knowledge and information resources, including references to adjacent but distinct approaches to research that looks primarily to the role(s) of intellectual property systems in...