Learning from Lin:

Abstract

This chapter explains how Elinor Ostrom’s work on natural common-pool resources has limited lessons to offer intellectual property scholars, virtually none of which is normative. Her body of work provides an object lesson in how carefully structured conceptual, methodological, and analytical tools, such as her Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, can assist in (1) understanding information flows under alternative institutional arrangements; (2) diagnosing problems in existing institutional arrangements; and (3) predicting, in at least some cases, the outcomes of changes in institutional arrangements. Her work offers little or no normative guidance for the structure of intellectual property systems or knowledge commons. Scholars need to bear in mind that in Ostrom’s work on common-pool natural resources, in contrast to “knowledge commons,” “open access” was often the problem to be solved, rather than a solution to a problem of too little access to information.