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Information as a Common-Pool Resource

Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded on October 12 to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons. Commons? That sounds familiar! Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce, can be used up, unlike digital goods) yet need to be or should be governed as a commons — classically, things like water systems and the atmosphere. This work is cited by many scholars of non-rivalrous commons (e.g., knowledge commons) as laying the groundwork for their field, one example being James Boyle in his recent book, The Public Domain.

In 2003 Ostrom herself co-authored with Charlotte Hess a paper contextualizing knowledge commons and the study of other commons: Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource. It includes a citation of Creative Commons, which was just about to launch its licenses at the time the paper was written. The entire paper is an excellent read. Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, and to the Nobel Prize committee for making an excellent choice, highly relevant in today’s world. Hopefully, this will be only the first of many grand prizes for the study of the commons.
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/18426