Augustin Cournot's original concept of "complementary oligopoly" has recently had a rebirth of interest after being relabeled "the tragedy of the anticommons" and finding fresh applications in the legal and economics literatures. The tragedy of the anticommons (the mirror image of the more well-known tragedy of the commons) occurs when too many rights holders to a good lead to sub-optimal usage...

The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both...

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in "cultural competence" efforts within U.S. medical school curricula. This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories o...

The two major concerns about peer-to-peer are anonymity and noncensorship of documents. Music industry has highlighted these questions by forcing Napster to filter out copyright protected MP3 files and taking legal actions against local users by monitoring their stored MP3 files. Our investigation shows that when copyright protected files are filtered out, users stop downloading public music as...