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Demanding The Angels’ Share: Intellectual Property And Spiritual Organization In The Urantia Foundation, Andrew Ventimiglia
Demanding The Angels’ Share: Intellectual Property And Spiritual Organization In The Urantia Foundation, Andrew Ventimiglia
Studio for Law and Culture
This article explores the role that intellectual property plays as it shapes the circulation and use of ‘The Urantia Book,’ a divinely revealed text published in 1955 and embraced by a community of believers. For many modern spiritual communities – of which the Urantian community is a telling example – their coherence no longer lies in a centralized institution like the church but instead in a shared dedication to sacred texts and other religious media. Thus, intellectual property has become an effective means to administer the ephemeral beliefs and practices mediated by these texts. This article explores a number of …
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: A Concise Introduction And Lexicon, Michael Heller
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: A Concise Introduction And Lexicon, Michael Heller
Faculty Scholarship
This article gives a concise introduction to the ‘tragedy of the anticommons.’ The anticommons thesis is simple: when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it. Usually, private ownership creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it leads to wasteful underuse. This is a free market paradox that shows up all across the global economy. If too many owners control a single resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Conceptually, underuse in an anticommons mirrors the familiar problem of overuse in a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ The field of anticommons …