Law Commons^™

Primitive Accumulation And Enclosure Of The Commons: Genetically Engineered Seeds And Canadian Jurisprudence, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

This paper juxtaposes the legal decisions made in the case of Percy Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto for patent infringement, against the attempt by the Organic Agriculture Protection Fund to obtain class certification in its efforts to sue Monsanto and Bayer for genetic contamination of organic canola. Together these two cases establish an unacceptable incongruity at common law between the rights enjoyed by intellectual property owners and any corresponding duties that might attach to their inventions. I suggest that Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation offers a suitable theoretical register for apprehending contemporary erosions of the commons through the enclosure …

Commons / Commodity: Peer Production Caught In The Web Of The Commercial Market, Bingchun Meng, Fei Wu

Philip F Wu

The development of digital technology and computer networks has enabled many kinds of online collaboration. This article examines Zimuzu, a Chinese case of online peer production, which provides an opportunity to extend our understanding of how the tensions between the commodity and commons production models are being articulated in an online setting. Using empirical evidence collected from face-to-face interviews, online posts and online ethnographic observation, our analysis demonstrates that there is constant negotiation over which aspects of the two seemingly opposing models will be adopted by the community. We argue that it is important to conceptualize the peer production process …

Public Access To Private Land For Walking: Environmental And Individual Responsibility As Rationale For Limiting The Right To Exclude, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Whether people have an independent right of access to walk on land they do not own is a question answered differently throughout the world, largely due to cultural, historical, and political variations amongst regions. In this decade, English citizens gained a legislated right to roam on privately owned land designated by the government for public access. The British government now designates land as access land by evaluating the nature of the land itself, not its ownership status. In Sweden, the right to roam on land owned by another has long been a deeply rooted cultural tradition, though not codified in …

Introduction To Creation Without Restraint: Promoting Liberty And Rivalry In Innovation, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This document contains the table of contents, introduction, and a brief description of Christina Bohannan & Herbert Hovenkamp, Creation without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation (Oxford 2011).

Promoting rivalry in innovation requires a fusion of legal policies drawn from patent, copyright, and antitrust law, as well as economics and other disciplines. Creation Without Restraint looks first at the relationship between markets and innovation, noting that innovation occurs most in moderately competitive markets and that small actors are more likely to be truly creative innovators. Then we examine the problem of connected and complementary relationships, a dominant feature of …

Things Fall Apart: Regulating The Credit Default Swap Commons, Kristen N. Johnson

University of Colorado Law Review

Financial markets are an important national and international infrastructure resource that reflect attributes similar to the those that characterize commons, as described in property law literature. Through a case study examining the credit default swap market, this Article illustrates the analogy between financial markets and a traditional commons. After exploring the attributes of a commons, this Article examines the costs and benefits of the credit default swap market. Similar to a traditional commons, tragedy in financial markets occurs when market participants capture benefits while imposing the costs or negative externalities from their activities on other members of society. Commons scholars' …

Knowledge Curation, Michael J. Madison

Articles

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. Equivalent attention rarely is paid to questions of old knowledge. To what extent should the law, and particularly intellectual property law, focus on the durability of information and knowledge? To what extent does the law do so already, and to what effect? This article begins to explore those questions. Along the way, the article takes up distinctions among different types …