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Full-Text Articles in Political Economy

The Color Of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, And The Making Of Americans (Introduction), Anjali Vats Jan 2020

The Color Of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, And The Making Of Americans (Introduction), Anjali Vats

Book Chapters

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, the body of legal doctrine and practice that governs the ownership of information, is animated by a dichotomy of creatorship and infringement. In the most often repeated narratives of creatorship/infringement in the United States, the former produces a social and economic good while the latter works against the production of that social and economic good. Creators, those individuals whose work is deemed protectable under copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and unfair competition law, create valuable products that contribute to economic growth and public knowledge. Infringers, those individuals who use the work of creators without their permission, steal …


Data Governance And The Emerging University, Michael J. Madison Jan 2020

Data Governance And The Emerging University, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

Knowledge and information governance questions are tractable primarily in institutional terms, rather than in terms of abstractions such as knowledge itself or individual or social interests. This chapter offers the modern research university as an example. Practices of data-intensive research by university-based researchers, sometimes reduced to the popular phrase “Big Data,” pose governance challenges for the university. The chapter situates those challenges in the traditional understanding of the university as an institution for understanding forms and flows of knowledge. At a broad level, the chapter argues that the new salience of data exposes emerging shifts in the social, cultural, and …


The Football As Intellectual Property Object, Michael J. Madison Jan 2019

The Football As Intellectual Property Object, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

The histories of technology and culture are filled with innovations that emerged and took root by being shared widely, only to be succeeded by eras of growth framed by intellectual property. The Internet is a modern example. The football, also known as the pelota, ballon, bola, balón, and soccer ball, is another, older, and broader one. The football lies at the core of football. Intersections between the football and intellectual property law are relatively few in number, but the football supplies a focal object through which the great themes of intellectual property have shaped the game: origins; innovation and …


Biobanks As Knowledge Institutions, Michael J. Madison Jan 2019

Biobanks As Knowledge Institutions, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This chapter describes biobanks as institutions for collection, preservation, curation, and production of knowledge and information, in both material and immaterial forms. That characterization calls for research and comparative analysis of the broad diversity of specific biobanks, using a standardized research framework. Such a framework is identified and described here, as the knowledge commons framework. The chapter describes applications of the framework to biobanks to date and suggests directions for future research.


Commons At The Intersection Of Peer Production, Citizen Science, And Big Data: Galaxy Zoo, Michael J. Madison Jan 2014

Commons At The Intersection Of Peer Production, Citizen Science, And Big Data: Galaxy Zoo, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis via the Internet. In the second place Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, sometimes known colloquially as crowdsourcing, by which data are gathered, supplied, and/or analyzed by very large numbers of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to an …