Law Commons^™

From Land Grab To Agrarian Transition? Hybrid Trajectories Of Accumulation And Environmental Change On The Cambodia–Vietnam Border, Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In recent years, thousands of Vietnamese migrant farmers have crossed the border into Cambodia and leased land for export-oriented rice and shrimp production. Based on case studies in two Cambodian border provinces, we argue that these land transfers represent an intersection of broader processes of agrarian change that is re-shaping the Cambodian borderlands into a hybrid socio-ecological zone. Cambodian landlords and intermediaries use unequal access to politico-legal authority and the exclusionary power of the border to leverage control over their migrant tenants, thereby capturing a significant portion of the surplus from the migrants’ high-value commodity production systems and potentially creating …

Knowledge Commons (2016), Michael J. Madison, Katherine J. Strandburg, Brett M. Frischmann

Book Chapters

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 institutional contexts concerning innovation and creativity.

Knowledge commons refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge or information, including resources linked to innovative and creative practice). Commons refers to a form of community management or governance. It applies to a resource, and it involves a group or …

Understanding Access To Things: A Knowledge Commons Perspective, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This chapter explores the related ideas of access to knowledge resources and shared governance of those resources, often known as commons. Knowledge resources consist of many types and forms. Some are tangible, and some are intangible. Some are singular; some are reproduced in copies. Some are singular or unique; some are collected or pooled. Some are viewed, used, or consumed only by a single person; for some resources, collective or social consumption is the norm. Any given resource often has multiple attributes along these dimensions, depending on whether one examines the resource’s physical properties, its creative or inventive properties, or …

Information Abundance And Knowledge Commons, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

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 institutional responses to the need to coordinate the use of intellectual resources given their natural abundance, and not necessarily useful or effective responses at that. The chapter aims to shift analytic and empirical frameworks from those grounded in law to those grounded in governance, and from IP law in isolation to IP law as part of resource …