Distributed Cooperation and Property Rights in the Commons

The networked medium of the Internet lowers the technical barriers for distributed collaboration and peer production, however the challenges of creating and sustaining large social and cooperative enterprise are immense. This paper is a survey of prior literature and current theories of cooperation and property rights, particularly in the context of distributed online communities. The recent Open Source phenomenon has been influential in the software community; for many people, this notion of distributed production in the public domain appears appealing in different contexts of human enterprise. What are the social incentives, norms and mechanisms that emerge in such distributed communities to support peer production? Under what conditions is an Open Source approach effective and what are its serious limitations? Few studies manage to address such questions in a critical manner. While Open Source is appealing for ‘socially closedknit’ and technically savvy communities, it presents many challenges for sustaining the social organization and productive capacity in diverse distributed networks. Applying models of distributed peer-production towards knowledge-intensive design, which is traditionally situated in physical and cultural settings, requires careful consideration. What can we learn from cooperation, user innovation and social norms in co-located communities to understand innovation in distributed online settings? Transferring the Open Source model to knowledge-intensive domains like craft and product design, requires us to critically examine the nature of the design process, role of physical interaction, culture and “place” as well as the social norms and notions of intellectual property rights in such “communities of practice”. Distinct notions of property rights regimes emerge within different social settings, and conversely influence the level of conservation, access, exclusivity and incentives for productive capacity. We examine both private and communal property rights, and the relationship to the public domain. We consider property rights in the context of natural resource systems, small-scale product innovation as well as online digital content. Finally, we explore the key challenges and mechanisms to support intellectual property rights for grassroots innovators and subpatentable innovations. Many tensions emerge between perceived notions of protection, compensation, and public good. Appropriate policies must be carefully devised within specific contexts in a participatory manner, and facilitated by their own communal and institutional settings.